Yesterday I took the exam AZ-401: Designing and Implementing Microsoft Agentic DevOps Solutions

It’s a ‘beta’ exam which means that a) I used a special code to get a discounted price and b) I don’t find out if I’ve passed for a few more weeks - probably around the time that the exam becomes generally available.

When Microsoft announced the availability of AZ-401 they did mention that “Exam AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions and Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert will retire on February 1, 2027”

Passing AZ-401 along with either GH-300: GitHub Copilot or AZ-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator is a prerequisite for gaining the Microsoft Certified: Agentic DevOps Engineer Expert certification.

If you look at the study guide for this exam, you might not be surprised to learn that it’s quite similar to AZ-400, with just a bit more AI thrown in.

I previously passed AZ-400 and as it turned out I recently got an email saying the renewal test for that certification was available. I did that earlier in the week as a useful form of preparation for AZ-401 (though obviously it didn’t cover any AI subjects).

Not a good start

I’ve done quite a few certifications before and I write about most of them here. The last one I did was AI-102 12 months ago, so I thought I was prepared for signing in to do the exam. Turns out I was not.

Pearson VUE runs the exams, and you can take them either in-person at an exam centre, or online at a suitable place of your choosing (eg. in your home). My previous experience was that as part of signing in you would need to upload photos of the room where you intended to take the exam via your phone, and then usually a proctor would talk to you via video call (as part of the exam software) and ask you to move your webcam around the room and desk just to confirm that everything was fine, including that any additional monitors are not just turned away, but cords are physically detached.

The exam registration email from Pearson VUE after booking the exam includes this line:

One display screen only. Secondary displays must be disconnected, and touch screens are not permitted.

My desk usually has three external monitors mounted on monitor arms, so I had disconnected the others like I did last time in anticipation of a smooth onboarding experience.

What changed was that now there seems to be some AI checking of those photos (as it happens quite quickly while you’re still on your phone) and it will automatically flag anything it thinks is dodgy.

For me it was saying I had additional monitors - well yeah I do, but they were all disconnected and powered off. The problem is it doesn’t seem to be able to tell that. It also seemed to flag a TV and a whiteboard in the room. There is a TV behind me but it was turned off. I don’t have a whiteboard so I have no idea what it was looking at there.

The big problem is this is all automated - there’s no button to click to say ‘Check with a human’.

I was frantically running around the house trying to find a pair of pliers and a screwdriver so I could disconnect the two extra monitors from their monitor arms and remove them from the room entirely, and throwing blankets over the TV, in the hope that this would placate the AI, and crossing my fingers that it would decide I really didn’t have a whiteboard.

The other annoying thing is the both the exam desktop application, and the web page you launch on your phone seem to have timeouts while you’re in the signing-in stage - both would disappear after a few minutes (while I was disconnecting monitors) so then you have to go through the whole ‘relaunch the desktop app, skip through the hardware checks, then scan the QR code with your phone and re-submit room photos’ dance.

That was quite stressful, and not what you need just before you’re about to do an exam.

I get that Pearson VUE needs to be vigilant against cheating, but it feels like the pendulum is swinging too far, and especially without any way for human review or oversight (like how it worked for my previous exam) is a backwards step.

Conclusion

I can’t tell you about the questions in the exam - go take a look at the study guide.

One side-benefit I’ve found in doing exams is that often there are one or two questions on topics that you are less confident about or have had no experience with. I’m pretty strong on the DevOps side of things, having done a lot of Azure DevOps and GitHub work for a number of years now. Less so with the agentic side of DevOps mentioned in the study guide for this exam. I need to dig into these topics a bit more in the future:

Monitor Azure workloads by using AI agents

• Deploy and configure Azure Copilot Observability Agent
• Deploy and configure Azure SRE Agent
• Investigate and resolve issues raised by Azure SRE Agent

Analyze metrics from instrumentation by using AI agents

• Analyze infrastructure performance indicators, including CPU, memory, disk, and network
• Analyze application performance by using telemetry and instrumentation data
• Analyze distributed tracing by using Azure Monitor Application Insights
• Configure and collection and management of GitHub Copilot agent logs
• Interrogate logs by using natural language queries or basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries

And as for the exam, I’ll be interested to see how I went!

Our previous car had a towbar, and we own a trailer. So when we were ordering our new Kia EV5 I enquired about getting a towbar fitted. The only slight hitch (pun intended) was that when the car was ready to pick up, the dealer apologised that the towbar was still on backorder and they’d let me know when it came in. It was probably a couple of months later when they called back to say it had arrived. I organised that it was fitted when the car went in for its first scheduled service.

The towing specifications for the Kia EV5 (from the 2026 model brochure) are as follows:

We have the base model - an Air 2WD SR, so it is rated to tow but has the lowest capacity. As I understand it, the main reason for the other models having higher capacity is down to the extra weight (and power) of the batteries that those models come with.

I don’t need to tow anything like a caravan or a boat. Our trailer is just a standard “6x4” - quite handy for getting a load of mulch for the garden, or transporting something that’s too big to fit in the car.

Even so, I was wondering how the EV5 would go even just towing a regular trailer with a light load. Would it struggle? Would it turn out that the only thing we could use it for is a bike rack? I was keen to find out.

The towing experience

When you attach a trailer to the EV5, it displays a notification on the infotainment display:

The checklist is just that - a list of steps that you should be aware of when preparing to tow something with the car. You can step through it, or just ignore it. It’s just informational.

The other interesting thing is that the car essentially switches to “towing” mode. You can tell this because a new icon appears on the driver’s dashboard:

It also automatically reduces the estimated range. Notice that my battery is charged at 100%, and yet the range shows as 321km (without the trailer our EV5 would show a range of ~460km when fully charged).

That’s a bit of a surprise at first - where did all our power go? Well nowhere. It’s still there (and if you disconnected the trailer it would jump back up to the normal number). But it makes sense - the car knows it has to pull some extra weight, and that will draw down on the batteries, and use up the charge at a faster rate. (It defaults to an automatic ratio, but you can override this in the Settings menu if you want to).

But how much impact would it have? That was what I was unsure about.

The very first time I hooked up our trailer to the car and took it for a test drive around the block, the car started dinging and these alerts kept appearing warning me that the trailer’s turning signal lights weren’t working! I’d checked the lights before departing so that was a surprise. I got out a wire brush and gave the trailer’s electrical plug (and the adapter) a good clean, hoping that removing dust and cobwebs might do the trick. Pleasingly it did. That’s a nice feature that the car is monitoring the lighting circuits to the trailer and letting you know if it thinks there’s a problem.

The next day we towed a load of furniture wit our trailer and had to drive up a longish hill. That was interesting, as while the car handled the load well, it was obviously using more power to do so - you could literally see the range reducing every few seconds. Fortunately once at the top of the hill the road evened out, and so did the electricity consumption. Once you’re on the flat then it doesn’t use much extra to pull the trailer along at all - momentum is a good thing sometimes.

Going back down the same hill was the opposite - the regenerative breaking was working overtime as now the car had the trailer pushing it slightly from behind (not that you’ll ever generate more power than you use).

In the end I became comfortable that we could do a few trips up and down the hill and we’d still have plenty of capacity to get home.

Sensors

One other difference when the car goes into “towing” mode is that it disables a number of the sensors that you normally benefit from. The systems that warn you about cars passing you either side are disabled - presumably because otherwise they’d get confused by this trailer that’s following close behind you.

Likewise the reversing sensor (obviously) is also disabled. So you just need to be a little more alert when driving - some of those safety systems that you’re used to won’t be active.

Conclusion

While at first I was wondering whether the Kia EV5 base model would be able to tow anything at all, the good news is that yes it can, and does just fine.