I recently took the exam at home for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Certification (SAA-C02). I passed with a score of 775. The exam was harder than I anticipated and I had a very tough time with the exam’s check in process.

I used a few resources to prepare for the exam: A Cloud Guru’s course on Udemy, practice tests on WhizLabs, and AWS FAQs. The A Cloud Guru course was a good overview of most of the exam objectives, but not thorough enough. The practice tests were very easy that came with the course. WhizLabs’s tests were nearly as hard as the actual exam and good to learn from. I recommend to read the following AWS FAQs: EC2, EBS, S3, Aurora, RDS, DynamoDB, VPC, Auto Scaling, and ELB.

The system check used by Pearson VUE is almost worthless. It does not do comprehensive enough checks on your computer and network. It appears to only check your Internet speed, webcam, and microphone. I did it a few days before the exam, the day of the exam, and every time it said I was good to go. However, I had an issue that prevented me from completing the check-in process and I barely got it working in time.

I got through the cell phone steps where I had to take photos of my ID, my room, and myself. Then Pearson VUE’s OnVUE gave me the following error message.

You have lost your internet connection. OnVUE is disabled until your connection is restored

My computer was obviously still connected to the Internet. I did the process again and got stuck at the same spot again. I got a hold of Pearson VUE’s support after waiting 18 minutes. They were not helpful at all. I did some troubleshooting and googling. I found a lot of people with the same problem and no resolution. Then I finally figured out what was the problem for me. I use Sophos XG Firewall Home Edition. Very rarely, Sophos’s IPS and/or virus scanner can cause odd issues with websites not working. I disabled both of those services and then I was able to move to the next step of my check-in process with one minute to spare. Pearson VUE’s system check should be much more thorough and catch issues like this so that the exam taker can work out potential issues beforehand.