While I was preparing for the Elastic Certified Engineer exam, I googled about mock practice tests and chanced upon this excellent blog series of 4 tests.(Scroll to the bottom of the blog for links).
Attempting the exercises in these links did wonders to my confidence as I found lapses in my preparation strategy, got a chance to correct them and also got exposure to the questions and how to answer them.
As for the format, while it can be found from Rich Raposa’s webinar, the webinar tells you what to expect but attempting the mock exercises actually gives you a feel of the exam which makes a difference.
From the exercises, the first part is about deploying and operating a cluster. The first exercise – configure the nodes to avoid split brain - is no longer on the agenda so that can be skipped. Same way exercise 2 can be skipped as well. Exercise 3 is about optimization and could help you with Cluster Management section e.g. diagnose shard issues and repair a cluster’s health. Exercise 4 is about snapshots, cross-cluster search which again comes under Cluster Management so both exercise 3 and 4 are helpful.
The second part is pretty relevant as it covers the topics of data management – index, templates (index and dynamic) and also data processing – reindex, ingest pipeline, painless scripting. One thing to note is that the exam can combine multiple objectives into one question. E.g. a question on re-index could also include ingest pipelines. Do attempt all the exercises in this post.
The third part covers mapping and text analysis which would be under Data Processing Category. This is very important and would help to attempt all the exercises here. Note that this does NOT have exercises for Runtime fields.
The final part covers exercises for Search and Aggregations and forms a very important part of exam preparation. One thing to note is: Pipeline and Matrix aggregations don’t look to be in the exam agenda. Please skip whatever doesn’t conform to the agenda. In case of any doubts about whether a particular topic is on exam agenda or not, just drop an email to certification[at]elastic[dot]co. The Elastic Certification team is pretty responsive and helpful.
Final Note: These exercises are excellent to boost your preparation strategy and level up your confidence but do NOT cover all the topics so you'll likely need mock exercises from other sources for the missing topics.
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