Ok. So I know I said that it’s over but I don’t think learning is ever over. I’m proud to say that I’m officially BIG-IP DNS (formerly GTM) certified! It’s been almost a year since I took my last certification exam so I needed one to get back into the swing of things and seeing that “Passed” is always a nice feeling.
Thoughts on the Exam
This exam covered the BIG-IP DNS module which focuses mainly on DNS functionality. While I did not think this exam was terribly difficult, I did not get every question correct and I have some experience with this particular module. I felt the questions were pretty straight-forward and helped introduced some items or objects that you may or may not be using within your environment. For example, I have used BIG-IP DNS to resolve more than just A records such as MX, SRV, and TXT records in one environment, but in another environment, I’ve only used this module to handle Wide IPs. There are so many ways to utilize BIG-IP DNS that every environment will likely introduce something new which is always nice to see. There’s a lot of information in this module so make sure to use the blueprint to your advantage.
Getting 100% is not the goal. You get the same certification if you score 70% or 100%. A Pass is a Pass.
How Do I Become BIG-IP DNS Certified?
The exam required to become BIG-IP DNS certified is the 302 exam. As usual, F5 does a really nice job of providing a visual of this pathway :
As with any 300-level certification, you must first pass both the 101 and 201 exams to become a BIG-IP Certified! Administrator. Once you have gone that far, all 300-level exams become available to you.
Study Material
Operations Guide
What did I use to study? Like I mentioned earlier, I do have access to this module in a production environment and responsible for management of the device. Even with that level of access, I built a lab environment in AWS so that I could play around with some of the settings as I went through the Operations Guide and some F5 articles. One of the things that really helped me was looking at the GUI and then looking for a F5 article that talked about the settings in a particular section so I could better understand them. This section of the Operations Guide talks about DNS services:
Operations Guide – DNS Services
There are too many F5 articles to list out but building a lab is necessary, in my opinion. It allows you to screw things up and understand why you screwed it up. You can build out a lab in Azure as well since F5 has Virtual Editions in their marketplace. Please use whatever is comfortable to you and make sure to keep an eye on those charges, if you end up using one of these cloud environments.
Practice Exams
Practice exams are vital and should be considered a necessity when attempting any 200 or 300-level exam. As I’ve said in other blog posts around these certifications, they give you a similar experience as you have on exam day even if the questions are not on the exam. I love having these available to me and you can purchase 1 practice exam for $25 or 2 for $40 dollars. You have 90 days to use them. I, typically, take one at the beginning of the process and then one about a week or so before exam day so I can get an idea on how I’ll do on the exam. The practice exams are offered here:
Exam Studio – F5 Practice Exams
What’s Next?
Well, I’m on the path to taking the 402 and becoming an F5 Certified! Solution Expert – Cloud. I plan to take this exam at the end of September so we’ll see how it goes. This exam is focused more around cloud technologies and how F5 will fit into these architectures. Cloud is all about sizing and the larger you go with a particular VM, the more expensive it becomes. So I’m interested in learning more about cost-efficiency and what changes now that you don’t have access to Layer 2 anymore.
Until next time!