SRA Study Guide 2026: How to Pass on Your First Attempt

What You Are Actually Preparing For

Nokia Service Routing Architect (SRA) is not a single exam you can cram for over a long weekend. It is a multi-exam certification, separate from NRS I and NRS II, that ends in a hands-on practical lab. That structure changes how you should study. A single-exam credential rewards breadth of recall; SRA rewards the ability to design, configure, verify and troubleshoot service networks on Nokia 7750 SR platforms under time pressure.

Before you plan anything, read the full picture of the credential in our overview of what SRA certification is so you are certain you are preparing for the Nokia track and not a similarly named credential from another body. Everything in this guide refers exclusively to Nokia Service Routing Architect.

The Current Route: Five Written Exams Plus the Lab

Effective September 8, 2026, the current route requires five written exams followed by the practical lab. The table below maps each component to its subject area so you can see the whole path at a glance.

The Composite Shortcut and Its Limits

Nokia offers an optional composite exam, 4A0-C02, that substitutes for only 4A0-102, 4A0-105, 4A0-106 and 4A0-107. It does not replace 4A0-115, and it does not replace the practical lab. If you choose the composite, you still owe the EVPN written exam and the lab. Weigh this against your own strengths: a composite covering four subject areas demands that all four be fresh in your mind simultaneously.

What Changed and What Did Not

The lab page on the issuer's site still displays superseded prerequisite exams. For current eligibility, rely on the dated September 8, 2026 program update and the current certification table. Under that update, separate IS-IS/OSPF, MPLS and Services Architecture exams are no longer required, although that knowledge remains very useful as preparation. Multicast 4A0-108 is retired and is not a current SRA requirement. Candidates who were previously lab-eligible retain that eligibility under the announced transition. For a fuller walkthrough, see our guide to SRA requirements and how to qualify.

Course prerequisites are preparation recommendations, not additional examination requirements, and training is not mandatory to attempt the exams. That said, structured learning can shorten the path; our page on SRA training options covers what is available.

BGP for Internet Routing (4A0-102)

This is the foundation exam for most candidates because BGP concepts recur in the VPRN, EVPN and lab content. Treat it as a prerequisite for understanding everything that follows, even if you take the exams in a different order.

The recurring theme is why a route is or is not selected and advertised. Know the attribute order of preference cold, then practice predicting outcomes of routing policies before you run the verification commands. The practical lab scope repeats these topics, adding regular expressions, redistribution and AS peering, so every hour spent here pays off twice.

Virtual Private LAN Services (4A0-105)

VPLS is where Layer-2 service thinking meets MPLS transport. Candidates with a pure routing background often underestimate how much loop prevention and MAC-learning behavior matters.

MTU is a classic source of subtle faults in distributed services, so build the habit of checking it at every hop. The lab scope adds BGP autodiscovery, BGP VPLS, LDP VPLS with autodiscovery, FDB size alarms, MAC aging and discard behavior, and OAM, so practice those hands-on rather than only reading about them.

Virtual Private Routed Networks (4A0-106)

VPRN is Layer-3 VPN on Nokia's platform, and it is a heavy user of everything you learned in BGP. The exam moves quickly from fundamentals into advanced topology and inter-provider designs.

For the lab, the practical scope adds route distinguishers and route targets, VRF import/export, route selection, and static, OSPF or BGP PE-CE routing. Drawing the control-plane and forwarding-plane paths for Inter-AS A, B and C side by side is one of the most efficient ways to separate them in your memory.

Quality of Service (4A0-107)

QoS is the broadest and most mechanism-heavy written exam in the set. It is less about one big concept and more about many interlocking components, which is why candidates often find it the most tedious to retain.

Ethernet VPN Services (4A0-115)

EVPN is the newest written exam in the route and the one that distinguishes the updated SRA from older versions of the path. It is also the only written exam that the composite does not cover, so no shortcut exists.

A useful discipline here is to build a route-type table in your own words: which route is generated, by whom, and what it causes the receiving PE to do. Designated-forwarder election and split-horizon logic are where many candidates stall, so work through failure scenarios on paper before configuring them.

The 7-Hour Practical Lab (ASRA4A0)

The lab is the defining element of SRA. You design and implement live 7750 SR service networks, interoperate between components, diagnose performance and resolve faults using either classic CLI or MD-CLI. It is a practical assessment, not a multiple-choice item count, so no question-count figure applies.

Format

The lab runs seven hours across two independent 3.5-hour sections, excluding a one-hour lunch. Topics must be configured and verified, although not every topic necessarily appears in a given sitting. The issuer states the lab content is unchanged by the 2026 program update.

The written exams test whether you understand a feature. The lab tests whether you can make it work, prove it works, and find what is broken. Reading the domain breakdowns in our guide to the SRA exam domains alongside your lab practice helps you connect each written topic to its hands-on counterpart.

A Sequencing Plan That Respects the Dependencies

Rather than a generic schedule, order your study by how the subject areas depend on one another. This is the only general-method section in this guide, and it is tied directly to the SRA content.

The twelve-week arc is a planning aid, not a requirement; adjust it to your experience. A candidate who already runs BGP in production can compress the opening block, while someone new to VPLS may need to extend it. You can gauge your starting point with the diagnostic tools on our SRA practice test site, and our difficulty guide explains which sections tend to feel hardest.

Where First-Attempt Candidates Lose Ground

Studying Written Topics Without Touching the Lab Equipment or Emulation

Because the written exams are separate from the lab, it is tempting to prepare with reading alone and defer hands-on work. The lab scope overlaps the written topics so heavily that this wastes the most valuable preparation window. Configure what you read about.

Treating Verification as an Afterthought

The lab requires topics to be configured and verified. A configuration that is typed correctly but never checked is a risk, because a misconfigured MTU or a missing import policy can look fine until traffic fails. Build the habit of confirming state after every change.

Relying on Outdated Prerequisite Information

Older material and the lab page itself may reference superseded prerequisite exams or the retired multicast exam. Confirm your route against the current program update, and check our scheduling guide for timing considerations. Likewise, be careful applying NRS I changes announced for March 2027; they do not alter the SRA scope described here.

Expecting Hard Numbers That Are Not Published

Candidates often search for a single pass rate, a scored/unscored item split, or one overall fee. None of these is established for the SRA route as a whole. Our write-ups on the pass rate question, the passing score and certification costs explain what can and cannot be stated reliably. Budget for several separate exam attempts rather than one price.

Who Uses This Credential

SRA targets engineers who design and operate IP/MPLS service-provider and enterprise-core networks, particularly where Nokia 7750 SR platforms carry VPLS, VPRN, EVPN and QoS-managed services. Typical roles include network architect, senior network engineer and service-provider operations specialist. The credential signals that you can move beyond configuration to design and troubleshooting.

If you are weighing the investment, our analyses of whether the certification is worth it, the salary picture and relevant job roles lay out the considerations without inventing figures. For readers still orienting on the basics, what SRA is is a good starting point.

Frequently Asked Questions