Hello everyone, I’m currently preparing for the SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted exam and would like to ask for guidance from those who have already passed. I’ve taken the exam multiple times and noticed that most of the questions are scenario-based, especially around troubleshooting and best practices. I would appreciate any advice on the following: * Key topics that carry the most weight in the exam (alerts, polling engines, scalability, HA, etc.) * Best way to study SolarWinds architecture and observability concepts * Recommended hands-on labs, demos, or practice environments * Common pitfalls or trick questions to watch out for * Differences I should focus on between Self-Hosted Observability vs SaaS HCO Any tips, study plans, or real exam experience would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your support. Best regards, Caesar Ramones

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How to Pass the SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted Exam – Study Tips & Preparation Guide

Hello everyone,

I’m currently preparing for the SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted exam and would like to ask for guidance from those who have already passed. I’ve taken the exam multiple times and noticed that most of the questions are scenario-based, especially around troubleshooting and best practices.

I would appreciate any advice on the following:

Key topics that carry the most weight in the exam (alerts, polling engines, scalability, HA, etc.)
Best way to study SolarWinds architecture and observability concepts
Recommended hands-on labs, demos, or practice environments
Common pitfalls or trick questions to watch out for
Differences I should focus on between Self-Hosted Observability vs SaaS HCO

Any tips, study plans, or real exam experience would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance for your support.

Best regards,
Caesar Ramones

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NVSteven

Take one of the live prep studying classes. It gave me the best insight into the test and the SW viewpoint of the questions. Sometimes the questions/answers may not align with real life. Similar to MS testing.

sjames

Yeah the exam is mostly scenario-based. I passed it and the questions are usually about what you’d do first or what’s the best practice not deep technical detail.

The important stuff was:

Architecture (pollers, web server, SQL, data flow)

Alerts (trigger/reset, actions, what to check first)

Scaling/HA (when to add pollers, split roles, what can be redundant)

Agent vs agentless (when each is appropriate)

Don’t memorize instead understand how the system works end-to-end. do a few hands-on tasks such as discovery, add a node, create an alert. Practice questions help mainly to get used to the wording. A lot of people use CertBoosters for that. Self-hosted is more about operations (managing pollers, DB, upgrades, HA). SaaS is more about using the UI, dashboards, alerts since the backend is managed for you.

If you focus on those areas and get a little hands-on time, you’ll be fine.