Elastic Search Certified Engineer — Preparation guide

Welcome. If you are working on elastic search and evaluating/considering taking elastic search(ES) certification, you are at the right place.

I have recently completed ES certification (Dec 2020) and sharing my thoughts on the exam with ES 7.2 version and preparation materials.

Motivation

Typically, elastic stack is used in log aggregation. However, I got an opportunity to solve a challenging customer facing business use. I had to ingest 100 million different data records every day and make it available for search.

This has been a fantastic journey since I got to tinker with infrastructure, cluster management, indexing, automated performance testing and searching.

Elastic Certification took my knowledge to the next level. It is an expensive one but provides a much better insight and personal satisfaction.

Outside of the Elastic Search I and II courses, I found very limited training available to get ready for the exam. I’m sharing the materials I found useful and my exam experience.

Preparation

Start with Linux academy(aCloudGuru) - ES Course by Myles Young . https://acloudguru.com/course/the-linux-academy-elastic-certification-preparation-course

1. Get yourself comfortable with Indexing, analyzer first. - People tend to focus more on searching. But in reality, the depth lies in indexing and analyzer.
2. Query and Aggregation — For certain queries, you can use Leaf queries or a compound bool query. Solve questions with both leaf and bool query. Practice both, it will help you in performance tuning in your project. Pipeline aggregations takes a while to grasp, spend ample time and practice those.
3. Cluster settings, cross cluster reindexing and cross cluster search — Try outside the box. Do play around and understand how to clean up. During my practice, I was testing “cluster allocation” and “force awareness” configuration and my cluster was stuck in a cyclic loop. Only way to fix this was to get rid of data folder in all nodes, since the data node will join only the master with same UUID. If you get stuck, you should know how to revive quickly.
4. Infrastructure and cluster management — Bootstrap and Securing a cluster does take some time to understand if you do not work with SSL certificates often. Once you get ready, time yourself and review any steps you can optimize. You should be able to do this with 10 min at ease.
5. Spend ample time reviewing elastic search documentation and get comfortable with searching different topics.

Practice.. Practice..Practice

Try all the questions here at least twice.

1. https://github.com/glenacota/elastic-training-repo/tree/master/exercises Do practice the 6.8(older) version question. Hints: https://medium.com/kreuzwerker-gmbh/exercises-for-the-elastic-certified-engineer-exam-deploy-and-operate-a-cluster-b06741760d47
2. https://whatgeorgemade.com/exercises/

3. Practice all the ingestion pipelines — foreach, split, set etc.

4. Exercise does not include boosting queries. Practice a few.

My practice answers can be accessed from here for 1 & 2.

Example: Show all the flights owned by Logstash and Kibana. The results should rank the flights starting from “Treviso” higher than others.

Examination Tips

You will be logging into examslocal.com, which tunnels into elastic.co or AWS environment. Expect it to be buggy and slow.

Use a windows machine. I’m a mac user and did not have a windows machine, had wasted at-least 30 min in right clicks and paste.

Examslocal.com supports 2 screens. You will get only 75% screen space due to VM on browser. Plan to have an external monitor or larger screen.

No notepads application available. Plan to keep track of your progress using a browser address bar or in kibana.

There are no pass percentage or scoring for each question.

Start with questions you can solve in 10 minutes and/or without any documentation help.

If you get a question that looks different from your practice, park it for last and use documentation. Try multiple approaches and write the query.

Don’t give up when you see challenging question. There will be ample time to figure out if strategies a plan and knock out known questions faster.

Enjoy the prep, good luck with your certification.