Sources and method

Only the vendor's own pages

Every price, length, question count, validity period, renewal rule and prerequisite is read from the vendor's official certification pages, exam guides and FAQs, and every exam links to the page it came from, with short quotes kept as evidence. No prep sites, course sellers, forums or salary surveys. Where a vendor does not publish a value (many do not publish question counts or passing scores), the field is left out rather than guessed.

Checked every Friday

Every Friday at 9:45 UTC, the site reads each current exam's official page again (one request per exam) and compares the price, length and question count on the page with the week before. The first reading of a page is only a baseline, so a page has to change before a value can. When the page now shows a different value, the change is recorded with the old value, the new one, the date and the page, the exam shows the new value with an Unverified badge, and a person checks it. Microsoft's pages draw their price with a script, so its prices are read from the same data file those pages use.

When the plain patterns cannot tell which value a changed page now shows, a language model (Gemini, no web access, at most two calls a week) reads the changed text; it can only confirm a value that is written on the page.

Each run reads a site's robots.txt before any page and skips what it disallows; a site that answers 401, 403 or 429 is not asked again that week, and nothing is retried in a loop. Pages behind a sign-in are never read.

How new exams are found

The same Friday run also looks for exams that are not here yet: new Microsoft and GitHub certifications in the Microsoft Learn catalog, and new exam pages in vendors' own site maps (NVIDIA, the Linux Foundation, Elastic), a few a week. A find is added as Unverified with only what its page states, until a person checks it; a find that is not an exam is hidden, never deleted. Every company that joins Glyph's company registry is enrolled too, and a few a week are checked for a certification program on their own site. Exams on sites that draw their facts with a script are read by hand from the public data those pages load, each with the day it was read.

History

Nothing is overwritten silently. Every change to a tracked field is appended to the change log first, and retired exams stay listed with their retirement date. Dated changes the vendors announce themselves (new exam versions, scheduled updates, retirements) are recorded from their pages too, including future dates.

Levels and tracks

• Foundational: Entry level: concepts and services, no hands-on experience required.
• Associate: Practitioner level: about a year of hands-on work with the platform.
• Professional: Advanced: design and run production systems, usually two years or more.
• Specialty: One domain in depth (security, machine learning, networking).
• Expert: The top of a vendor path, often requiring an associate credential first.

Vendors name their levels differently (AWS "Practitioner", Snowflake "Advanced", NVIDIA "Professional"); each exam page shows the vendor's own word next to this common scale.

Not company compliance

This site tracks the exams people take. Compliance (compliance.fru.dev) tracks the certifications companies hold, such as SOC 2, ISO 27001 and FedRAMP.

Across Glyph

Vendor names and slugs follow the shared registry at companies.fru.dev; vendor pages link to the same company on the other Glyph Ibis sources.

Disclaimer

Exam facts from each vendor's own certification pages, re-read every Friday; changes the check finds are marked unverified until checked by hand. The list grows as vendors launch new exams. Prices are US list prices before tax and vary by country; the vendor's page is the final word. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners. Anonymous usage stats via Google Analytics. Use Suggest a correction on any page.