How I passed the Dynatrace Associate Exam

Introduction

At the start of this year I set myself a goal to get at least certain DevOps and monitoring related certifications before the end of year 2018. Any Dynatrace related certification was one of them. I recently attempted the Dynatrace Associate Exam and achieved 82%, while the passing percentage was 72. I have been using Dynatrace Managed daily at my current job for the past six months or so, mostly for debugging and analysis of performance problems. However, the blueprint of the Associate exam suggested quite a few topics that I needed to work on so I could feel comfortable.

My goal in writing this article is sharing my own experience about the preparation and the exam as there wasn't much found while I looked for it myself.

Some info about the exam

Before I booked the exam all I knew about the exam was that it was multiple choice questions. A Dynatrace consultant who took the exam mentioned that it is primarily about knowing where features lie in the tool. Upon investigating a bit on the Dynatrace community, I found that the Associate level certification intends to check the following:

- That the user is aware of all Dynatrace features/dashboards/reports available in the tool from analysis/outcome & navigation point of view.

- User is aware of all the supported monitoring capabilities.

- User has experience real life use cases


Based on the above the following is how I went about preparing for the exam.

The preparation

since I had been working with Dynatrace already for the past six months or so, I gave myself two weeks of dedicated effort to prepare for the exam while I had been on vacation visiting my parents.

I decided to start with those recorded videos and judiciously watched the infrastructure and analysis related sessions. After about a week of watching these recordings, I decided to test myself out using the mock test. I managed 66% in the test while the passing was 100% i.e. getting all the 15 mock test questions right. This was a reality check and what I found lacking was my understanding of the global/local settings and the terminology. That is when I decided to fall back at the Dynatrace online documentation. While I read the documentation, I also played around in the tool and familiarised myself with Dashboards, Custom graphs, Smartscape, Reports, Applications, Process groups, Services, Databases, and the uniqueness of all the views. I also suggest familiarising with the process views based on their technologies such as Java, .NET, etc. I also made sure I familiarised with the counters especially the application related such as Appdex, bounce rate and the server side stats based on respective graphs.

While I went through the glossary definitions I also decided to watch the Dynatrace university videos so as I also get familiarised with the application navigation and the terminology used. I then decided to test myself again with the mock test and fared much better with 13.2 questions right out of 15.

Besides the above, following were some tips from the Dynatrace community regarding preparation for the test:

- Reading documentation exhaustively and follow this up with hands-on using the Dynatrace free trial(15 days)

- Download and refer to the blueprint and the mindmap of the exam.

- Covering all videos in university: this can be done basis your convenience as a mix up with hands-on and documentation reading.

- Attempting the free mock test available (once in 24 hours) to get actual taste of the test.

- Keeping a close watch on community discussions to give you taste of real life issues & their corresponding solutions

The exam day

Having done my best, I finally decided to revise what I had already learnt right before the exam.

At the exam, once you login to Examity you need to connect to the proctor and confirm your identity.

Since I gave the exam from home, some of the other things I worried about were my home internet connection, connectivity with the proctor and other unwanted disturbances by family members who would visit often. I took my time in the exam and focussed on each question until I was comfortable with an answer. I wanted to answer the questions just once and did not want to come back to the them later. The proctor interrupted me mostly as I ventured out of the webcam screen. I finished the barely before the stipulated time and soon received my score. The proctor then checked the completion and asked the download of the certificate before closing the session.