Exam Blueprint

As was mentioned above, the F5 301B-LTM Specialist: Maintain and Troubleshoot test is the 2nd one in the series that the professional needs to pass to complete his or her F5-CTS, LTM certification. This exam verifies that candidates are able to perform basic F5 product designing and implementation tasks while knowing how to improve the efficacy of the Application Delivery Network. The score comes with two-year validity and requires one to get recertified before the expiration date.

All the F5 exams follow almost the same pattern. F5 301B is 90-minute long and consists of 80 questions. Out of these, only 70 are scored and the remaining 10 are beta or pilot items. The test is computer-based and the questions are mostly provided in the multiple-choice format while some of the tasks may be of the scenario-based type. The passing score is 245 out of 350. Finally, the registration fee is $180, excluding the local taxes.

Reference: https://techdocs.f5.com/dam/f5/kb/global/solutions/k29900360/301b_-_BIG-IP_LTM_Specialist_Maintain_and_Troubleshoot.pdf

Mandatory Prerequisites

The vendor states that one should have a valid F5-CA, BIG-IP certification before aiming at the F5 301B exam. One more eligibility requirement is to first secure the passing grades in 301A BIG IP LTM Specialist: Architect, Set up, Deploy Exam. This demonstrates a firm knowledge base and makes the whole path much easier.

Exam Domains Overview

301B exam is based on three domains and tries to testify candidate’s knowledge on various topics, including the following:

• Troubleshoot basic hardware issues

  As the title suggests, the second module is dedicated to the key issues and some of the most common ways to deal with them. This part of the outline is quite extensive and consists of 15 sub-domains. By going through all of them, the applicants will learn more about what all it takes to determine which iRule to use to resolve an application issue, the iRule functionality, how to correctly interpret the AVR information for defining performance issues as well as the LTM device misconfiguration, and how to choose the appropriate HTTP/HTTPS application headers.

  Finding out the HTTP/HTTPS application errors & their solutions, comparing the traces to determine the root cause of an HTTP/HTTPS application problem and the best way to resolve it, finding out the right protocol analyzer tool, and identifying from where to gather the protocol analyzer data are also covered well in this exam domain along with the topic such as how to define monitor issues and solutions for them.

• Troubleshoot basic performance issues

  The last section assesses if the test-taker is aware of LTM device logs issues, can find what can cause them, and what are the ways to construct a viable solution. Other skills needed include the ability to find out why LTM device failover problems arise as well as high availability and/or sync failure. Finally, applicants should know how to interpret log file messages, and more.

• Maintain Application and LTM Device Health

  This first section intends to check how the candidate determines the appropriate profile setting modifications in a given scenario along with sub-set of an LTM configuration, LTM device statistics, finding out the appropriate upgrade and recovery steps, ways to minimize application outages, benefits of custom alerting, and setting up custom alerts.

  AVR alerting capabilities, vCMP environment upgrading, SCF and UCS files, performance statistics, and buffer settings in the TCP profile are some of the skills included in this exam domain.

F5 301b Exam topics

Candidates must know the exam topics before they start of preparation. Because it will really help them in hitting the core. Our F5 301b exam dumps will include the following topics:

• Troubleshoot Basic Hardware Issues
• Maintain Application and LTM Device Health
• Troubleshoot Basic Performance Issues