Cisco SD-WAN Exam: Done!

  • Sun, Oct 2, 2022
  • 4-minute read

Finally, I achieve the Cisco SD-WAN Certification! 💥

First attempt

As many of you already know, back in August I failed the first attempt 😞

On August 12 I took and failed the exam in Padua (Italy). I decided to share it on Twitter (if you’re in Tech I strongly recommend you this Social, the community is huge and strong!) and I received kind messages and help from SD-WAN experts.
I must admit that I was not happy about the result…. here is the score report of the first attempt:

  • Architecture 92%
  • Controller deployment 89%
  • Router deployment 67%
  • Policies 75%
  • Security and Quality of Service 89%
  • Management and Operations 50%

The final score was 814/1000…not that bad but surely not enough! I felt bad, I felt I had disappointed expectations…I said to me:

You can fail but you can not give up!

Second attempt: The good one 🍀

I took 1 week completely off, I went to the mountain and sea for some days, trying to convert the bad vibes into energy.
When I returned I decided to try again and I spent the following 45 days studying and practicing. I read again the Official Cert Guide and reviewed some videos of CBT Nuggets Course .
Then, I decided to wipe the old lab on eve-ng and create a new one…. Great choice! I review the onboarding procedure (tricky certificates) and other “one-shot” tasks.
I moved on with policies and created all the content that I published here in the blog:

Trust me, creating these contents helped me a lot during the learning phase! I had to learn every single step and line of configuration to configure policies and more!

✅ On September 29 I took and passed the Cisco SD-WAN Exam!💥

I received a lot of kind messages on Twitter and LinkedIn ….thank you all once again! 💝

Resources

How to study SDWAN? Well…. There are tons of information that can be found online. During the last months I decided to go through this resources in order to pass the 300-415 exam and achieve the certification:

CBT Nuggets course is incredible! All the instructors are well-prepared and they explain the concepts smoothly, I love them! 😊
Along with this course I created a small topology on my EVE-ng server, it helps me in testing and practicing with particular features like TLOC-Extension, template and policies.
The Book is a must, you can buy it from CiscoPress site (take care of the extra tax, it arrives from USA) both physical and digital copy, from Amazon or read it online on Oreilly
Then, I discovered “networkacademy.io” and all the wonderful materials inside, what a great site! It’s helpful and insightful!

Next SD-WAN post

Of course, I’m not done with Cisco SD-WAN. I already planned the following blog posts:

  • SDWAN - TLOC Preference
  • SDWAN - Hub-and-Spoke Topology

Actually, I don’t know the order yet…. but I’ll publish these two posts for sure 😊

Next certification?

Now, I can return to my DevNet journey ! I had to pause it for a while, now I’ll take some weeks off and then come back to it!

Thanks for your time I hope that you’re enjoying my blog!
If you have some questions, please drop me a message through social networks!😊
👈 You can find the relative icons here on the left of the page

Riccardo

SDWANCiscoCisco CertificationCareer300-415ViptelaCisco SDWAN