Accredited Configuration Engineer

The ACE Exam No Longer Exists — Here’s What Happened

If you landed on this page planning to book the  Accredited Configuration Engineer (ACE) exam, you should know upfront: you can’t. Palo Alto Networks retired the ACE certification when it released PAN-OS 9.0, pulling it from the Palo Alto Networks Learning Center where it used to be delivered. The company confirmed this directly in its own LIVEcommunity forums, after a wave of candidates who’d completed the associated training course found no exam link waiting for them Cisco small and medium business engineer practice exam

This isn’t a rumor or an outdated blog post getting it wrong — it’s Palo Alto Networks’ own statement. So rather than pretend otherwise, this page exists to do two things: explain where the ACE’s content went, and keep a set of PAN-OS fundamentals practice questions available for anyone who still wants to drill the underlying material — whether that’s for job-interview prep, refreshing old knowledge, or warming up before a current Palo Alto Networks certification.

Is an Existing ACE Certificate Still Valid?

If you earned the ACE before it was pulled, yes — your certificate holds until its listed expiration. Palo Alto Networks never invalidated certificates retroactively; it just stopped issuing new ones. There’s no renewal path back into ACE itself, though, since the underlying exam no longer exists to retake.

From ACE to Today: The Replacement Chain

The ACE’s retirement didn’t happen in one step — it’s part of a longer pattern of Palo Alto Networks restructuring its certification catalog, and candidates researching this today will run into three different “generations” of replacement if they search broadly. Here’s the chain, as accurately as it can be traced:

Note that even the secondary sources disagree on the exact month PCNSA stopped being offered — some cite August 2024, others January 2025 — which is itself a sign of how quickly Palo Alto Networks has been cycling its certification lineup. The practical takeaway is the same either way: if your goal is a credential you can actually book today, look at Network Security Professional (the closest living equivalent to what ACE and PCNSA used to cover) rather than chasing a retired exam code.

Why These Practice Questions Are Still Here

The ACE and the old PCNSA both tested the same foundational PAN-OS skills that still matter in a Palo Alto Networks environment today: zones, security policies, NAT, App-ID, User-ID, and basic troubleshooting haven’t disappeared just because the exam names have changed. Palo Alto Networks’ newer Network Security Professional exam builds on this same base, just reorganized around a job-role framework instead of a single product-knowledge test.

So the question set below isn’t marketed as “official exam prep” for a bookable test — it’s a foundations check. If you’re new to PAN-OS, studying for an interview, or getting ready to tackle Network Security Professional, working through these questions is a reasonable way to confirm you’ve actually absorbed the basics rather than skimmed the documentation.

PAN-OS Fundamentals Covered

This isn’t a published exam blueprint — there is no current official ACE blueprint to publish — but it reflects the proportion of questions across the practice sets, based on the areas PAN-OS administrators are actually tested on across Palo Alto Networks’ certification history:

Where Candidates Historically Got Tripped Up

A few patterns held true across the ACE’s run and still show up when people new to PAN-OS take these questions today:

Confusing how Security Policies and NAT Policies interact is probably the single most common stumbling block. Candidates understand each in isolation but underestimate how traffic actually gets evaluated — security policy match is based on the pre-NAT or post-NAT zone depending on configuration, and that trips people up constantly in scenario questions.

Default firewall behavior is another blind spot. People study what they configure and skip over what the firewall does out of the box — default deny behavior, the implicit rules at the bottom of the security policy, default log settings. Scenario questions love probing exactly this.

App-ID and User-ID get studied as separate checkbox topics rather than understood as layered identification systems that work together — which is how they’re actually tested.

How to Use Practice Questions Effectively Here

Because PAN-OS questions tend to be scenario-based rather than pure recall (“given this traffic flow and these zone assignments, what happens”), working through explanations matters more than tallying a raw score. Read every explanation, right or wrong, and specifically note why a given policy or object behaved the way it did — that’s the skill that transfers to administration work and to newer exams like Network Security Professional.

If you’re using this material to prep for a current Palo Alto Networks certification, check the exam’s own published blueprint on the official certification site first, since the current role-based exams weight topics differently than the legacy ACE did.

A Note on Studying for a Retired Exam

If your goal is strictly a credential you can show an employer today, don’t spend weeks preparing for ACE-style content expecting to book a test at the end — it doesn’t exist. Use this material to build genuine PAN-OS fluency, then route that effort toward Network Security Professional or, if you’re earlier in your career, Cybersecurity Apprentice, both of which Palo Alto Networks currently issues and tests.