Achieving any certification was never an easy task, no matter what people say. Nonetheless, it's not that difficult with the right tools, resources, discipline, and time investment.
Before investing your time on any certification, it's always good to ask yourself these questions:
- What is this certification about?
- Why do you need this certification?
- Does this certification helps you, in any ways, to achieve your goal?
- How fast do you want to be certified?
If you realize, the last question has nothing to do with the certification's content. The reason why the last question is crucial is because it determines how badly you want it and how much effort you should be putting in.
Enough! Let's get into my journey of being Dynatrace Professional Certification.
What is Dynatrace?
Quick answer. Dynatrace is in the observability space and with its AI capability, it's no longer just logs, metrics, and traces. The product uses AI to identify problems and provides root causes. And one of another fanciful capability is the auto-discovery of the dependencies between nodes to form a topology and can be view using Smartscape.
Of course, there are many capabilities of Dynatrace which you can find it on the main website. Dynatrace.com
What is the Dynatrace Professional Certification Prerequisites?
At this point of article, you must have at least be Dynatrace Associate Certified. Also, having an experience with the Dynatrace products, Service Oriented Application Architectures, Cloud technologies, and Network protocols will definitely help with the learning journey.
What are the resources?
These resources are what I have used to achieve the certification:
- Dynatrace On-demand learning (Good for high level understanding and visual)
- Dynatrace Documentation (Good for more detailed information, for deep dive purposes)
- Dynatrace Professional Exam Mind Map (Good for exam coverage)
- Dynatrace vILT (Definitely useful to have an instructor and hands-on experience)
- Dynatrace YouTube channel (Good for use cases and understanding)
- Dynatrace Blog (Good for updates and use cases)
What are other advices?
I know, these information above are the typical advices that probably anyone could have known or told you.
But the next few advices that I'm giving will be quite generic for any certifications:
- Toggle between the resources as it will help you to stay focus.
- Set an achievable goal everyday, such as complete one/two topic(s).
- Seek help from people who has experience, including me.
- Stay curious as every capability in the product was built for a reason.
- Hands-on, hands-on, and hands-on.
- Discipline and time management.
I can't further emphasize on the last point. Consistency is the only way to see result.
Last but not least, if you ever failed on the exam on the first attempt, it's not the end of the world. You can always go for another shot. In fact, it has provided you an opportunity to learn what you don't know and to achieve a better result the next time.
Hit me up if you have similar certifications journey to share as well!