The DCA isn’t a standard multiple-choice test, and that catches people off guard. Of the 55 questions you’ll see in your 90-minute session, only 13 are conventional multiple choice. The other 42 are Discrete Option Multiple Choice (DOMC) — a format where answer options appear one at a time, and you answer “yes” or “no” to each before moving to the next. You can’t scan all four or five options and eliminate the obviously wrong ones the way you would on a normal test; you’re committing to a judgment on each option in isolation, with no option to revisit it.
This changes how you should practice. Drilling only traditional four-option multiple choice will leave you unprepared for the DOMC format’s actual rhythm, where partial knowledge (“I think this is right, but I’m not fully sure”) gets tested far more aggressively than on a standard exam.
Pacing-wise, 90 minutes for 55 questions gives you a little under two minutes per item on average, but DOMC items can take longer since you’re evaluating multiple true/false-style judgments inside a single question. Mirantis doesn’t publish a passing score — the company states explicitly that scores are subject to change without notice — so don’t study toward a specific number. Study toward command-line fluency instead.
Domain | Weight |
|---|---|
Orchestration | 25% |
Image Creation, Management, and Registry | 20% |
Installation and Configuration | 15% |
Networking | 15% |
Security | 15% |
Storage and Volumes | 10% |
Orchestration carries the most weight by a clear margin, and it’s also the domain where candidates lose the most points — for reasons covered below.
Swarm, not just Kubernetes. A lot of candidates today have solid Kubernetes experience from their day job and assume that transfers cleanly. It partially does — the exam does test Kubernetes pods, deployments, ConfigMaps, and Secrets — but the Orchestration domain is still built heavily around Docker Swarm: quorum behavior in a manager cluster, converting a docker stack deploy YAML file into a running stack, replicated versus global services, and node labels for task placement. If your production environment moved to Kubernetes years ago and you’ve never run docker swarm init outside a tutorial, this domain will cost you more than you expect.
DOMC item interpretation under Orchestration and Networking. Questions like “describe the difference between running a container and running a service” sound conceptual, but on the exam they get translated into specific CLI output you have to interpret — reading docker inspect or docker service ps results and knowing exactly what each field means.
UCP/DTR-specific security mechanics. The Security domain isn’t just “know Docker Content Trust exists.” It expects you to describe RBAC configuration within UCP, LDAP/AD integration, and how UCP client bundles are generated and used — enterprise-cluster administration tasks that a solo developer running Docker Desktop simply never touches.
Storage drivers and graph drivers by OS. Storage and Volumes is only 10% of the exam, so people deprioritize it — but it’s a narrow, memorizable domain (which graph driver pairs with which OS and filesystem, how devicemapper is configured) that’s easy to lock in with a few focused hours, and easy to fumble if you wing it.
Because nearly 80% of the exam is DOMC, your practice sessions should mimic that format specifically — don’t just drill flashcard-style recall. When you work through practice questions here, pay attention to how confident you feel about each individual option before you see whether it’s right, not just whether you got the final question correct. That’s the actual skill DOMC is testing.
Also build a habit of running the commands yourself rather than just reading about them. Questions ask you to “interpret the output of docker inspect” or identify what a flag does in a docker service create command — these are much easier to internalize by typing them into a terminal than by memorizing a reference table. A free Docker install and a couple of VMs (or even Play with Docker) covers almost everything you need hands-on.
Treating Kubernetes knowledge as a substitute for Swarm knowledge. The exam blueprint hasn’t dropped Swarm, and candidates who skip it lose points across a quarter of the test.
Skipping the Installation and Configuration domain because it feels “boring.” Backup scheduling for UCP/DTR, certificate-based daemon authentication, and logging driver configuration show up here, and they’re specific enough that general Docker familiarity won’t cover them.
Running out of time on DOMC items. Because you can’t jump back to reconsider an earlier “yes/no,” some candidates freeze mid-question. Practicing the format beforehand, not just the content, prevents this.
Going in without any Docker Enterprise Edition exposure. Mirantis’s own study guide lists DEE exposure as part of the target candidate profile; if you’ve only ever used Docker Community Edition, UCP- and DTR-specific questions will feel unfamiliar on exam day no matter how well you know core Docker.
Beginner (under 6 months with Docker): Plan on 8–10 weeks. Mirantis recommends 6–12 months of experience as a baseline, so if you’re below that, prioritize hands-on time — building images, running multi-container apps with Compose, standing up a basic Swarm cluster — before you start drilling practice questions.
Has related experience (daily Docker use, limited Swarm/enterprise exposure): 3–4 weeks is usually enough, with most of that time going toward Swarm orchestration commands and the security/RBAC material that a typical day job doesn’t touch.
Retaking the exam: Mirantis requires a 14-day wait before a retake, and you’ll pay the full $199 fee again — there’s no discounted second attempt. Use that mandatory gap deliberately: review exactly which domains you missed on your score report rather than re-studying everything from scratch.
The blueprint has stayed relatively stable since Mirantis took over administration from Docker Inc. in 2019, but Kubernetes-related objectives (pods, deployments, ConfigMaps, Secrets, ClusterIP/NodePort services, persistentVolumes) were layered into the Orchestration, Networking, and Storage domains as Mirantis’s own platform leaned more on Kubernetes via Mirantis Kubernetes Engine. If you’re studying from an older guide or a secondhand course that predates this, double-check it covers Kubernetes alongside Swarm — pure-Swarm material is now out of date.
Last updated on Oct, 15 2026
