CCIE Lab attempt

Yesterday was my first attempt at the CCIE RS lab. I would have liked to write here that it would also be my only attempt, but unfortunately I failed. I already knew as I was walking out of the Cisco Brussels office that I did not pass, but the e-mail I received this morning removed all (if any) hope I had left. Pass, Pass, Fail, that was my verdict. I knew I was going to fail, but a pass, pass, pass, fail would have been a little bettter.

Just for people wondering what this Pass, Pass, Fail or Pass, Pass, Pass, Fail means:

The lab exam is (as you will probably know) devided in three sections, Troubleshoot, Diagnose and Configure. Each of these sections have an associated maximum number of points that can be earned in that section.

Within each section you need to achieve a minimum number of points to pass for that section. Say something like 60% (the actual numbers might vary). The reason Cisco has done this, is so it will be impossible to skip a section. For the Diag section, which is very small they even went further and set this section to be a fixed 30 minutes. But if they did not have these two measures you might be able to skip diag and still pass.

Of course Cisco doesn’t want you to do that so they instituted a minimum score for each section. This means you have to pass each section with at least the minimum score

After this, you also need to pass the overal exam with the cut score, which is somewhere near 80%. So if you score 65% on all sections you might get Pass, Pass, Pass as section results, but still end up with a fail overall

This also means that if you’re weak on troubleshoot, but at least passed with the minimal section score you can still pass. Unfortunately it also means that you could theoretically have both troubleshoot and configure at 100%, but just miss 1 point on the diag section and still fail

So the rest of this post will be about my experience. There is a strict NDA on the exam, so I won’t tell you anything about the lab itself. Suffice to say that the blueprint covers all topics that will be on the exam.

First off, preparation

I’ve been preparing for this day for nearly 18 months now. I passed my written in December of 2017. After my written I started cranking up the labs. I did the Advanced Technology Course from INE and went through all those labs. I only started doing full scale labs once the ATC labs were done. This might have been a mistake for me. Since the time between the first ATC labs and the last has been measured in months this meant that stuff I learned in February needed to be relearnt in August, September and October. For anybody starting now my advice would be circle in. That means that you keep covering and repeating all the subjects, but every time you pass over it you zoom in a little bit deeper.

Since my written I’ve really focussed on doing labs. Theory was for the written I figured. This might be true in a literal sense, it’s not in a practical sense. The theory makes for understanding the problems you’ll encounter and will help you work around the restrictions you’ll be given in the lab. It goes without saying that you need to do the labs, but just don’t forget to keep up with the theory too. The best basis for the theory in my opinion is the Cisco documentation on their website. Using this documentation as a study source will help you understand almost any technology they can throw at you in the lab and it also helps you navigate the documentation during the lab.

The week before

My work gave me a week off to prepare for the lab. This week I turned off my cell phone, and did nothing else but full scale labs. These labs gave me the idea I was ready for the real thing. Of course improvements were always possible. I had some doubts about my speed and my multicast abilities, but I felt fairly confident. I felt that I should be able to take the lab.

On tuesday I traveled to Brussels. This was also the day my nerves really began to be noticable. I arrived around 3 pm in Brussels, so I had sufficient time to explore the neighborhood. I had been a bit late with my reservations for a hotel, so I had a hotel on a 10 to 15 minute walk from the Cisco offices instead of the hotel directly next door. Because of this I wanted to go there and exactly know how long it would take me to walk over to the Cisco offices. Since the weather was nice I enjoyed this walk, but it didn’t do anything for my nerves, so I went back to the hotel. Since it was only 4 pm by then I figured I would have sufficient time to practice with another full scale lab.

I approached this lab like I figured I would approach the real deal, so I read all the assignments, made some notes on interdependencies and figured a best way to configure all these without revisiting sections several times. I finished this lab well before time ran out and, if that would have been the real lab I would have a number now. This helped a bit against the nerves and it was time to go to bed anyway.

Lab day

On lab day I woke early. Went to have breakfast in the restaurant (which was terrible by the way) and checked out. I walked over to the Cisco office and was there 15 minutes early. The Cisco office in Brussels opens exactly at 8 and there is no use to be there 15 minutes early. So I had to kill some time. My nerves were really starting to play up again now, especially since I had to wait for it to begin. A few minutes before eight several other candidates started arriving, most were (like myself) a bit self-absorbed and probably coping with their own nerves.

At 8:15 the lab really started. I was assigned pod 6 (strange thing to remember).

Troubleshooting

During the first few tickets in troubleshoot I made good headway. I was ahead of time and was handling the tickets in the structured manner like I was used to do during my practice labs. My nerves started to abate a bit. Unfortunately that was the time for the first 4 pointer ticket. I did not make this ticket in the time I had alotted it, so I parked the ticket and went on with the next. The ticket after this also went awry. This escalated and the structured troubleshooting style went out of the window and I started looking all over the place. I started spending way too much time on each ticket since I was unable to solve them. In the end I used up the whole extra 30 minutes and managed to solve the first 4 pointer ticket I ran into right on the very last minute. I just got in a wr before the system locked me out of everything. I do believe that solving this ticket was the difference between a pass and a fail on the troubleshooting section, so you know now how I continued into the rest of the exam. I assumed Tshoot to be a marginal pass, so I knew i had to excel in Diag and Config.

Diagnose

Diagnose is a strange section. It isn’t so much how much you know or how fast you can configure it. Personally I think it tests real life experience by giving you trouble tickets that are incomplete. You must assume the role of a service desk engineer and create a hypothesis on incomplete information. If you have sufficient real life experience this should not be the hardest section, but even though the information is incomplete, it is a lot. So you have to discern what is important and what isn’t and which information you’re missing to validate your hypothesis.

If your hypothesis is wrong the whole ticket will probably be wrong.

However, even though Diag is a difficult section in its own way (like you have no way of verifying if what you think is actually the case like you do in Tshoot and config), I think I did pretty well on the section. You don’t get to see how many points you got, just that you passed the minimum requirements for a section, so you never know how well you did.

Configure

Then the configure part of the lab came about. This was all still before lunch, even though not by much. I was already experiencing stress due to the Tshoot section that didn’t go too well, so I wanted to jump in as fast as I could. When I saw the topology stress levels even increased. I had to really force myself to read through all the assignments before I started, but I started skimming assignments instead of actually reading them. I also did not create a plan on how to approach this section (all these things I made my mind to do…). This caused me to jump in and start configuring. The first subsection (Layer 2) went without any issues. I really thought I would have scored 100% on that section (my score report states differently, so I must have missed a requirement somewhere), so, so far so good. After the L2 section things went downhill fast. If you haven’t done the lab yet, I don’t think there is a way to really prepare for the number of requirements and text you have to read through, but let me say it’s a lot.

When it was almost time to stop I hadn’t even started on the last two sections of the Configure part of the exam, so I knew that I would not pass this time. I stopped configuring, saved my configs and spent the last 15 minutes just reading the exam again. I knew I had to come back for a second attempt and just reading, even if I don’t remember any of the specifics will help me maintain my composure next time. The sheer amount will (hopefully) not be as daunting next time.

Advice

So what advice can anybody who has failed give? The things I can give you are the things I will keep in mind for my next attempt:

• Build full scale labs from scratch. This will help you gain a sence of order of operations. When doing the lab this order is important since the assignments might not be ordered in the way you would do it in real life
• Even for the stuff that doesn’t necessarily have a fixed order, make an order for your own benefit. For example, do you configure access ports before or after you have configured all the trunks. It doesn’t really matter, but helps you keep on track during the lab
• Practice troubleshooting using a structured manner. It might not be the fastest way for all problems, but it is a guaranteed way to solve all problems.
• Learn to learn, not to pass a test. Even though learning to pass a test might make you pass the test, it’s not the way you should be doing this. If you’re just in it for the cert (and the associated monetary rewards) you might be cheating yourself. I would even say it’s not worth the effort that way.
• Even if you know you’re going to fail, make as much out of it as you can
• Enjoy the process

If you have any questions or remarks, please don’t hesitate to contact me.