How I became Elastic Certified Engineer in 2021?

4 min readApr 17, 2021

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I passed the Elastic Certified Engineer exam in April 2021, and I would like to share my exam experience and the resources that I used which could help in your certification journey. Let’s dive in.

Myself and Elasticsearch:

Since Jan 2020, I have been using Elasticsearch majorly at Egen and for one of our customer, we handle lot of Industrial IoT (IIoT) data and a huge cluster of over 100s of data nodes of Elasticsearch 1.7. Although this is very old version of ES and we recently did migrate over to Elasticsearch 7.8, the experience I had looking into the issues and the way our team handled it helped me to understand several concepts of Elasticsearch.

During the migration from Elasticsearch 1.7 -> Elasticsearch 7.8, I also got a chance to work on several api’s like below:

snapshot-restore: collection of api’s to support for data backups as snapshots and restoring them into running cluster.
remote-reindex: used to migrate indices from a remote cluster.
rollover: create new indices for a data stream or index alias.
update_by_query: update the index with mapping changes.

With this experience and to learn much more I decided to give the certification exam.

First and Foremost, DRY (DO Repeat Yourself) :

Watch this amazing exam walkthrough video from the Elastic team.
Read exam objectives over and over again. Use this json and index to it your local ES cluster and go over each document in the index during your preparation. Each document covers an exam objective and the documentation modules where to look out for.
Configure, setup, play around the Elasticsearch cluster in local and it can be easily done with docker.

Don’t memorize things. Stick to the Objectives.

You will always have the documentation available during the exam. So, you don’t have to worry about memorizing the syntax and also its impossible to cover all concepts of the ElasticSearch in a three-hour exam. The thumb-rule is to know what and where we have to search in the documentation for the given task. The tasks doesn’t go beyond the objectives mentioned in the link above.

I never used boost parameter before, in one of the tasks I was asked to search for three fields and specifically use boost of 2 on one of the field. The expected result should have the score of each hit equal to the total documents returned. (Ps: I am not posting the answer to make it fun, please try out).

My experience?

After I bought the exam voucher, I prepared for around 5–6 weeks reading and executing all the different objectives of the exam and in the process learnt new things too. Anyone who worked with Elasticsearch, would appreciate the way the documentation is setup. Its very rich and well explained but you could also get distracted as there are so many topics explained. So one tip is to stick to the exam objectives and use others for more insight.

During the preparation I learned more about:

The best way to learn Elasticsearch is to use it. So, along with reading the documentation, deploy a local ES cluster, secure it, index the documents, play around with the queries and do a snapshot restore etc.

My exam had 10 tasks ranging from simple search queries to securing a cluster and the total time limit is 3 hours. Each task has partial grading so its definitely recommended to attempt all the tasks. I was able to complete the exam well before 2 hours but took some time to revisit all the questions and validate the responses. I got the exam result in just 1 business day even though it is expected to take 3 business days.

Do expect the exam environment to be slow and buggy and there wouldn’t be any notepad applications available during the exam. So, one workaround is to use chrome browser or in kibana and also be familiar with basic linux commands.

Resources

Linux Academy certification course — Miles Young did a very good job in explaining things and its worth taking the course and an added advantage is to have hands-on labs to practice various tasks.

Free Practice Tests:

Concept Overview:

Exam experiences:

I hope this information would be helpful for your journey to the certification. Good Luck to your exam!!!!