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Newbie alert!!

I am looking for good resources to get certified as a professional Solarwinds admin.  Mostly in Network management and also in SAM Server and Applications .  Any suggestions?

  • Start by going to the success center and reading the getting started guides, there's links to lots of little videos as well to get the ball rolling.   Definitely read the admin guide and check out all the features in your environment, or stand up an eval on a vm for 30 days to mess with.   If you already have a paid license you can do the live webinars through solarwinds academy

    Success Center and lastly Its worth pointing out that some solarwinds reseller partners run training classes as well, like the ones we do at the company I work for

    https://loop1.com/solarwinds-public-training/

    And we now have a session focused specifically on the NPM cert.

  • Are there any kind of exam guides besides reading the Admin guide?  I just took the test and pretty much studied everything that was not on it.  LOL emoticons_wink.png

  • When I took it I just rolled through the topics outlined here

    https://support.solarwinds.com/SuccessCenter/s/scp-npm-exam-guide

    But I do monitoring consulting for a living for 5 years now, so I have maybe an unusual amount of exposure to this stuff, hard for me to remember what I learned from the admin guides and what I learned on thwack and what I learned from smashing my head against the keyboard over the years.

  • I spent the past two weeks going over this Success Center and making notes and trying to figure out what they actually were going to ask.  Took the test this morning and realized pretty much the stuff I was focusing on was not on the test.  emoticons_happy.png  At least it was free and I have one more wack at it. 

  • Just took and passed my SCP (SAM) this past week, one try pass (woot!). The admin guide is great to be honest, I was asking the same question for a while looking for more content and hoping I could find something along a practice test. I did come up with some basic things that I found useful.

    Live training sessions:
    Virtual Classrooms V2 | SolarWinds Customer Portal
    if you currently work for a company that leverages Solarwinds products you have access to live virtual classes, there are v.o.d.'s and teacher lead sessions. ask as many questions as you feel comfortable asking they are there to help you learn.

    Demo site:
    https://oriondemo.solarwinds.com/
    if your company does not have the module that you are testing for, or does not have Solarwinds at all, the demo site is great to get a hands on feel without having to deploy the servers/modules. Poke around and figure out the limits on stuff.

    Admin guides:
    Success Center
    everyone falls back on these as the best resource at your disposal for good reason, just go through the sections one at a time and follow all of the links the sections may have under them, pay special attention to stuff like limits and capabilities. examples (with out giving anything away), Can *module* do this, if so how many/ how many times?

    Thwack:
    https://thwack.solarwinds.com/
    oh boy did you come to the right place, if you are having a hard time grasping a concept or really want to test what Solarwinds is capable of doing the wonderful people here are always willing to help.

    Best of luck on your SCP,
    Scarelette