TSHOOT Exam review

vinbuck

So after a wild week of earning my CCNP and then going on the road for a mesh Wi-Fi deployment the rest of the week, i'm finally settled down enough to write down my thoughts on TSHOOT. This exam was a bit of an unknown for me because I had read all the reviews about what a breeze it was. I spent a large amount of time on ROUTE and SWITCH and changed my exam date multiple times to make sure I was ready. I didn't do that with TSHOOT and it was a bit unnerving because I only spent a good solid week preparing for it. I think the difficulty of TSHOOT is directly proportional to the amount of lapse you have between ROUTE and SWITCH and TSHOOT. Due to work and family demands, I took a rather long road to the CCNP (1 Year, 7 Months). The downside to that is that I was constantly having to relearn material and it took some work to dredge up the finer points of ROUTE as it had been 8 months since I took that exam when I sat for this one.

My prep consisted of the following:

1) Cisco TSHOOT OCG
2) Boson Cisco Press exam questions
3) Boson EX-SIM Max exam questions
4) GNS3 Lab of the topology connected to 3550x2 and 2950x2
5) Kevin Wallace TSHOOT Bulls-Eye strategies
6) Cisco exam demo

Here is how I rate the following prep I used in the same order

1) Useless!!!!!! There isn't much that isn't covered in the ROUTE and SWITCH books and the troubleshooting methodologies are more than covered in the Boson EX-SIM MAX software
2) Also fairly useless and a waste of prep time
3) The single biggest reason I passed TSHOOT is due to the EX-SIM max software. Be sure to read all the explanations to understand what concepts they are trying to teach. If you can successfully troubleshoot all 3 tests then you will pass TSHOOT.
4) The second biggest helpful thing I did was to build out the TSHOOT topology in GNS3 and live switches. Once you get familiar with the topolog, it's not too terribly complicated. I only had time to do this once, but I would recommend building the topology from the ground up several times by only looking at the network drawings.
5) These are very helpful and pair well with the Boson EX-SIM max
6) Also a great prep tool...use it several times before you take the exam.

Here are the strategies I developed while using the Boson sim...

1) Perform an ipconfig immediately when dealing with IPv4 issues to see if you have an IP address on the host. About a 1/3 of the time in the Boson sim, there was no IP on the host.
2) Ping the furthest private IP immediately and begin troubleshooting there if it responds. No need to ping all the way through the stack if you can reach the NAT point.
3) Redistribution - it's gotta be in the routing table to redistribute
4) Use the proper show commands for the various technologies - if a show command isn't implemented, that means it isn't necessary to fix the problem and you should focus your efforts elsewhere.
5) Abort, Abort, Abort and compare configs whenever you can - this is the single biggest help when troubleshooting because you can get to the heart of the problem.
6) Don't spend 30 minutes trying to solve a problem, Abort and move on if you don't solve it in 5 minutes. TSHOOT is testing your situational awareness as much as your troubleshooting knowledge. An engineer that spends 30 minutes fixing a problem with an access port while the core is down is useless.
7) Ping, sh run, sh vlan, sh ip route, sh ip protocols and sh int are your best friends - Boson is more restrictive than the actual exam in command usage, so if you can pass Boson, then you can pass the real thing

I didn't find TSHOOT to be quite the walk in the park that many people have, but then again, I had significant time gaps during my CCNP prep that I had to make up for. If you take the exams closer to each other, then it probably is fairly easy. Overall, this exam is almost entirely an exercise in troubleshooting and if you don't have experience doing that, then you may need to put in some extra prep time.

Good luck to those of you prepping for TSHOOT and the CCNP. It's a journey that's well worth the effort. I've become a much better Network Engineer since I decided to pursue the CCNP, and I picked up some great study habits that helped me learn how to prepare for something over a long time frame. I have no doubt that this experience will translate well into CCIE studying which is my next goal after a break.

Iristheangel

Nice review. I'll probably be shooting for my CCNP next year and it's nice to get some feedback about it

Carl_S_901

Great post. Thanks for sharing. I will definitely be coming back and re-reading this post when that time comes for me. (TSHOOT)

7of9

Congratulations!

waragi

Congratulations , and thank-you for sharing your thoughts on the exam.
I would go as far as saying your summary was so thorough that It put all the pieces togethe explaining the difficulties some people have working on the "crippled" ios when really the are trying to do commands they don't need to solve the peoblem at hand.

7of9

I think, for some of us, those commands that aren't needed are what we use to help us narrow down what the problem really is. I have a few commands that are just habit for me to run the moment I log into a device to troubleshoot.

A better strategy is likely to take those commands missing as a sign that whatever you were looking for with them is not the problem, however, for me, it meant that I spent far too much time just staring at the output of a show run on the devices, one that I couldn't even parse. I like to think I'm too young to be set in my ways, but apparently, I'm not.

alanaround

Good Review. I sat and passed TSHOOT earlier this week and used many of the methods above.

I ended up running out of time and not completing the final ticket. One thing I noticed about using the 'Abort' method in the exam compared to the Demo on Cisco's site, is that on the demo, you can un-select a ticket (Abort) and view the base config where everything is working as it should, with no ticket selected. In the exam, you can't and have to select another ticket to move the problem elsewhere. I found this out while I was on the last ticket and didn't have another ticket to select to try comparing configs

anyways - it was good fun. Now for ROUTE and then we're done (for now:D)

cheers.

Trap Jaw

Hi all,

I know I'm digging up a bit of an old thread, but I just had to say that vinbuck's review and advice for this exam helped me immensely, and now I'm CCNP certified!

Thanks heaps vinbuck!