SnowPro Advanced: Administrator (ADA-C01)
Manage, monitor, and optimize Snowflake account operations, multi-account organizations, RBAC hierarchies, resource monitors, billing governance, and cross-cloud disaster recovery.
Official Exam Specification & Quick Facts
Question Difficulty Breakdown
Exam Guidelines & Simulation Rules
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
The ADA-C01 exam contains 65 scenario-based questions over 115 minutes. Cost is $375 USD with a passing score of 750/1000 (75%). SnowPro Core is a mandatory prerequisite.
Domains include: (1) Account Administration and Management (~25-30%), (2) Security, Governance, and Compliance (~25-30%), (3) Performance, Scalability, and Concurrency (~20-25%), and (4) Cost Management and Financial Operations (~20-25%).
The `ORGADMIN` role operates at the organization level, enabling administrators to view global usage across all accounts, create new accounts in any cloud/region, and configure replication groups.
Resource Monitors track credit consumption on virtual warehouses or entire accounts, executing automated alert thresholds (e.g. at 75%, 90%) and triggering suspend/suspend_immediate actions when reaching 100%.
`USERADMIN` creates and manages users and roles. `SECURITYADMIN` inherits `USERADMIN`, manages all object grants globally, and configures network policies and MFA enforcement.
System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) connects identity providers (Okta, Microsoft Entra ID) to automatically provision, update, and deprovision Snowflake users and groups.
Failover Groups bundle databases, account roles, users, network policies, and resource monitors for coordinated cross-region, cross-cloud replication and automated failover.
`ACCOUNT_USAGE.QUERY_HISTORY`, `WAREHOUSE_METERING_HISTORY`, and `LOGIN_HISTORY` provide historical telemetry (up to 1 year) to audit performance, costs, and security.
Standard warehouses bill per second based on VM cluster sizing. Serverless features (Snowpipe, Materialized Views, Search Optimization) consume serverless compute credits managed dynamically by Snowflake.
Session policies define idle session timeout periods; Password policies enforce minimum complexity, lockout thresholds, and expiration intervals for local users.
The ADA-C01 credential is valid for two years from the pass date.
ADA-C01 certifies Senior Snowflake Administrators, Enterprise Database Operations Leads, and Cloud FinOps Managers earning average US salaries between $135,000 and $180,000.