Seeking Advice for Advanced Splunk Certification Prep

[eden60]

Hello Splunk Community,

I'm preparing for the Advanced Splunk Certification from splunk free courses and splunk course and would appreciate your insights:

1. Any challenging topics in the exam?
2. Recommended resources beyond official docs?
3. Tips for effective hands-on practice?
4. Any recent exam updates?

Thanks for your help!

[PickleRick]

Well... It's not easy to respond to those questions without really breaking the NDA. Let's just say that courses relatively well cover the exam material (I find Splunk exams way more sticking to the course knowledge range than some other vendors). As for hands-on experience - well, for the user exams nothing beats having user experience of course - if you can, set up your home lab, gather some data (from your local computer, from your home router, try to set up some other data sources) and try to find interesting stuff from that data. There can be some things you'd normally never expect which can be splunked (for example, I ingested my exported spotify history and did some stats on that). For the more "adminish" exams - it's always good to rework the course material, set up your local environment. The course guides are very good source of info as well as the official docs. There are some guides on the net but they do not 100% follow the certification requirements so they don't necessarily have to be relevant to your particular exam.

[richgalloway]

The exam blueprint (https://www.splunk.com/en_us/pdfs/training/splunk-test-blueprint-advanced-power-user.pdf) and Certification Study Guide (https://www.splunk.com/en_us/resources/splunk-certification-exam-study-guide.html) will tell you the topics of each exam.  You decide which are challenging. 🙂

Exam questions are based on the course material so focus on that.  Other resources are unreliable.

[inventsekar · Accepted solution]

Hi @eden60 ...

may i know if you taken the Splunk fundamentals (three courses.....1, 2 and 3 i think), that will be very helpful to clear first certification.. Splunk Core User Certification. 

1. Any challenging topics in the exam?
   there is an exam preparation guide. it got all topics of the exam you are looking for. 
2. Recommended resources beyond official docs?
   hands on practice. for min 3 to 6 months(depending on your grasping power) 
   
   
3. Tips for effective hands-on practice?
   do some mini-projects--- upload some sample datasets and try to run some SPL yourself. create dashboards, reports, alerts.. etc
   i myself did a small project recently.. pls check it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htm6l_PzWhw
4. Any recent exam updates? 
   recently splunk created a new certification... Splunk certified cybersecurity defense analyst (there is a free training for this.. check it)
   
   hope this helps you and other new splunkers.. Karma / upvotes are appreciated by everybody. thanks. 

[PickleRick]

One correction here.

There _used to be_ three Fundamentals courses which corresponded to several certification levels. Fundamentals 1 covered the material needed for the Core User certificatio, Fundamentals 2 covered Core Power User, Fundamentals 3 (along with some additional courses) covered Advanced Power User.

Some 2 years ago or something like that Splunk redesigned their learning path and split the Fundamentals trainings into smaller, shorter, single-subject courses. There used to be a "mapping" document which showed which single-subject courses' material had belonged earlier in which Fundamentals training (sometimes a single-subject course covers material range which normally would be included partially on two different levels of Fundamentals trainings) but I can't find it anymore.

Anyway, for the trainings recommended for a particular certification (and required prerequisites - both trainings and certifications - for the higher certification levels) just see relevant certification track description.

https://www.splunk.com/en_us/training/certification.html