AZ-401: Designing and Implementing Microsoft Agentic DevOps Solutions

Exam Quick Facts

AZ-401 is in beta. Microsoft can revise its objectives and the features it assesses, so check the live study guide before booking. Microsoft’s launch announcement targets general availability in December 2026; this is a plan, not a confirmed release date.

AZ-401 is the new exam. The same announcement says its predecessor, AZ-400, and the Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert credential retire on 1 February 2027. That is not an AZ-401 retirement date.

Study Resources

Microsoft’s certification page says its official Practice Assessment is not currently available. The independent practice bank linked below is not that assessment.

Skills at a Glance

These are Microsoft’s published ranges, not exact percentages for an individual exam. Our 250-question practice bank uses an editorial allocation of 45/30/90/45/40 questions: 18/12/36/18/16%. All five allocations are within the published bands.

Who is this exam for?

AZ-401 is for developers and infrastructure administrators who design and operate DevOps processes across Azure DevOps and GitHub, with AI assistance.

Microsoft expects practical experience with YAML, KQL and Bicep, alongside collaboration, automation, security, delivery and monitoring. Know how to validate an AI-generated change, inspect its permissions and evidence, and decide when human approval is needed.

Passing AZ-401 is not the whole Expert credential requirement. Microsoft’s launch announcement also requires either GH-300 or AZ-104. Confirm the current certification requirements when planning your exams.

Skills Measured

Design and implement processes and communications (15-20%)

• Connect planning, builds, deployments, operations and feedback.
• Use Azure Boards and repository links to maintain traceability.
• Translate business goals into measurable DevOps outcomes and evaluate queries produced with AI assistance.
• Maintain project documentation, ownership, release notes and collaboration rules.
• Configure GitHub and Azure DevOps MCP integrations, webhooks, skills, and boundaries for agent-driven work.

Design and implement a source control strategy (10-15%)

• Choose between trunk-based development, feature and release branches, Git flow, GitHub flow and Git worktrees.
• Enforce pull-request reviews, branch policies and merging restrictions.
• Configure repository permissions, tags, hooks and work-item traceability.
• Migrate repositories from Azure DevOps to GitHub.
• Recover or remove specific Git data without damaging unrelated work.

Design and implement build and release pipelines (35-40%)

• Choose package feeds, upstream sources, views and versioning strategies.
• Combine local, unit, integration and load tests with coverage and release criteria.
• Design Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions runners, triggers, dependencies and reusable components.
• Validate AI-assisted YAML changes and configure environment checks and approvals.
• Implement GitHub Agentic Workflows using the current documented controls.
• Select deployment patterns, order dependencies and plan rollback or hotfix paths.
• Use infrastructure as code and configuration management.
• Improve pipeline duration, reliability, cost and retention.

Design and implement a security and compliance plan (15-20%)

• Choose service principals, managed identities, GitHub Apps and scoped tokens appropriately.
• Use secretless authentication and control service-connection access.
• Integrate Key Vault, secure files and GitHub secrets without exposing sensitive data.
• Configure dependency, code and secret scanning in the correct GitHub or Azure DevOps product.
• Connect Microsoft Defender for Cloud to DevOps environments and investigate the findings.

Implement an instrumentation strategy (15-20%)

• Build useful dashboards for flow, cycle time, lead time and recovery time.
• Connect Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Azure DevOps and GitHub information.
• Configure operational alerts and GitHub insights.
• Deploy and configure Azure Copilot Observability Agent and Azure SRE Agent.
• Investigate infrastructure performance, application telemetry and distributed traces.
• Collect Copilot agent logs and validate natural-language or KQL query results.

How to Prepare

Use the official objectives as a checklist of things you can demonstrate. Build a small repository, connect its work items, create a pipeline, and deploy to a disposable environment. Add a test failure and trace it from the commit to the failed release.

Then introduce AI assistance. Review a proposed YAML change, test an MCP integration with limited permissions, and compare an agent’s investigation against the actual logs. Distinguish a suggestion, an authorized action and a verified result.

Build and release pipelines carry the largest weight. Give them the most study time, without treating security or monitoring as optional. Product details can change during beta; verify unfamiliar commands and capabilities against the current feature documentation.

Practice Questions

Revise AZ-401 with 250 original practice questions across all five domains, with explanations, wrong-answer reasoning, learning hints and first-party references.

Before you buy: AZ-401 is in beta as of 30 October 2026. This is independent selected-response supplemental revision, not official Microsoft questions, a pass guarantee or a promise to reproduce the live exam’s formats, proportions or lab content. The scenarios are original; the bank does not contain recalled beta questions. Use hands-on work and Microsoft’s current resources alongside it.