Never in my life I left a testing facility with a smile that big like I did on 16 august last year. It was just minutes ago that I received my score on the Cisco CCNP Troubleshoot (TSHOOT) exam. It was the magic 1000 points, incredible high! Not that the a lower score should had matter, the reason behind the smile was the fun I had in answering the tickets. All the pain of doing the CCNP route exam twice earlier that year was suddenly disappeared.. 🙂

Cisco did a very good job in creating this exam. I have to troubleshoot a lot in my daily work, so for me troubleshooting is like a second nature. However I do have a few recommendation to make it more fun;
– Create a few tickets where more than one thing is broken, stuff like that happens in the real world!
– I missed the option “it is not the network, it is the server..” sounds like a joke but with the ability to look into the network traffic and spot a “tcp reset” from the server could prove a configuration failure on the server. (yes, that kind of prove is sometimes necessary…)
– Where was the option “It is a IOS bug, create a TAC case”? 😉