Elastic offers four certifications focusing on different technologies from their stack: Elastic Certified Engineer, Elastic Certified Observability Engineer, Elastic Certified Analyst and Elastic Certified SIEM Analyst. Elastic Certified Engineer focuses in the underlying technology of index management, cluster/node management, querying and searching data in indices using Query DSL (Domain Specific Language). It took me a month and half of preparation to go for the exam and I successfully passed the exam in the first attempt. In this blog, I am sharing my experience with the certification and provide a link to the materials, I prepared the exam with. Hope it helps :D

Resources

A. Exam Objectives

This is “The Guide, The Syllabus”, which you have to keep coming back to orient yourself for the cert amongst the vast Elastic documentation.

Link: Elastic Certified Engineer Exam Objectives

B. Learn Elastic Portal (Best resource)

The best resource to prepare for the certification. Kudos to Elastic for giving the lab exercises with virtual hosted labs (mind blown emoji) for free. There are 20 lab exercises dedicated for this certification and I recommend doing them all at least once. I even did some exercises twice. So, spend good amount of time doing these labs.

Elastic Learn Portal Link to Learning Plan https://learn.elastic.co/learn/learning-plans/24/elasticsearch-engineer-self-paced-learning-plan

C. Video Resources

I am linking two webinars here. Both are from Elastic’s official Youtube channel.

1. https://youtu.be/9UpB-s_ZfNE: This is almost one hour long and talks in detail about the exam. But some details could be outadated compared to current exam version. This video is unlisted, so you cannot find it searching in Youtube. I liked it because the trainer walks nicely through the exam portal.
2. https://youtu.be/TdqeeFWkykY: This is the official video description of the certification by Elastic. Just 10 minutes long and gives you a good overview of the certification.

I did not follow any video tutorials so I am not recommending any.

D. Practice Resources

Once I went through the lab exercises, it was time to brush up my skills with practice. I had prior experience with Elastic but I needed to practice and really have a good feel for querying and knowing where in documentation I can find the right resources. This definitely needed practice.

1. Pistocop dev blog: My second favorite of all resources I encountered. The blogger has very nicely documented their notes and exam experience. It was good to practice from these notes.

2. mr1716 Github repository. Contains practice tasks for each exam objectives with answers and links to the documentation.

3. George Bridgeman’s blog. Contains 30 practice questions each with answers. Good to practice with a timer.

4. ChatGPT or Claude: I recommend you to ask ChatGPT to prepare 10 questions for you based on exam objectives. Try to do that in 3 hours only with the help of Elastic Documentation. Then, you can give your answers back to ChatGPT and ask it to grade it.

   Here (github link) are the practice sets I practiced through (produced by ChatGPT, answers by me). I have tested them in my local Elastic cluster. Hopefully it helps.

   I did this type of exam three times before sitting down for the exam. It helped me a lot and ChatGPT also gave me some good feedback to work with.

E. Some Exam Favorite Topics

1. Runtime field in mapping and searching
2. Dynamic field templates
3. Analyzer and custom analyzer
4. Aggregations, sub aggregations
5. Multimatch queries
6. Function scores and boosting
7. Async search
8. Update by query
9. Reindex by query
10. Index life cycle management
11. Cross cluster search
12. Pagination with and without ‘search_after’
13. Ingest pipelines - Split, Set, Remove, Grok, Script
14. Painless Script Basics (useful in runtime fields, function scores, ingest pipelines, update by query, reindex by query)

Exam Experience

The exam costs 500$ and I felt the difficulty was moderate. Although, I must say there are no obvious or straighforward tasks. Each of the task required careful reading and a reference to documentation. There were a lot of complaints in Reddit with TrueAbility and proctored exam. But, I faced no issue from the exam platform. Only issue was my mac gave me a popup once to connect to my iphone and use it as the camera. I hurriedly clicked ‘Remind me later’ to come back to the exam and then it went smoothly. I received my results in email after a week appearing for my exam. You can see how you did in each exam module in the TrueAbility portal.

Make sure you go through the FAQs once before you attend the exam. Good luck 🤗.