AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam experience and few exam related tips

I sat the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam today and passed, in this post I would share my exam experience and a few exam related tips.

There were 55 questions in this exam and and most of the questions were quite trickier than AWS Solution Architect - Associate exam and I hardly found any definitive question however that doesn't mean you would not read and understand definitions of different services ;) 

There were scenario based questions about changing tenancy of a running instance, placement group, EBS snapshots, Instance/ephemeral storage, ELB, Auto-scaling, Route53 records, Routing policy, IAM policies, S3 storage related backup scenario, network connectivity related questions in VPC, Cloudwatch alarms, health checks, Multi-AZ RDS & Read replica, Elastic beanstalk, Cloud Formation, Opswork and AWS shared responsibility model etc.

Here is my exam score, Overall Score: 83%

Topic Level Scoring:
1.0 Monitoring and Metrics: 87%
2.0 High Availability: 100%
3.0 Analysis: 55%
4.0 Deployment and Provisioning: 87%
5.0 Data Management: 85%
6.0 Security: 75%
7.0 Networking: 100%

About the preparation of this exam, learn ins and out of all the AWS services covered in this exam by heart and the best option to do that is, watch this certification's training CBTs few times and once you are done with that now review the FAQ of these services and read AWS security withe paper once. 

I used Ryan Kroonenburg aka AcloudGuru's ( AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate  online ILVT course and Elias Khnaser's AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate course on Pluralsight however i must say any one of these course is suffice to pass the exam.

I would also suggest going for AWS solution architect course/exam first, as it would give you a better understanding about most of the AWS services and provide a solid base for this SysOps exam.

My Previous post about AWS Certified Solution Architect exam experience and few exam related tips can be found here.

Finally before going for the exam, make sure you also practiced on various sample questions available over web, however don't depend on then them as you would find many wrong answers there (however you will be able to to catch them only if you know the ins and out of different serveries by heart).

Hope this would be helpful in passing you AWS Sysops exam....Best of Luck!

That's it.... :)

Windows Server reboot/shutdown events in event viewer

Ever found yourself wondering about an unexpected system reboot, these event IDs are very useful while one is investigating the cause of unexpected system shutdown/reboot. 
I not sure about others but but always found hard remembering these event IDs so making a note for future reference and believe others will also find it useful.

Server reboot/shutdown events:

•  Event ID 6005: “The event log service was started.” This is synonymous to system startup.
•   Event ID 6006: “The event log service was stopped.” This is synonymous to system shutdown.
•   Event ID 6008: "The previous system shutdown was unexpected." Records that the system started  after it was not shut down properly.

•   Event ID 6009: Indicates the Windows product name, version, build number, service pack number,   and operating system type detected at boot time.
•    Event ID 6013: Displays the uptime of the computer. There is no TechNet page for this id.
•    Event ID 1074: "The process X has initiated the restart / shutdown of computer on behalf of user     Y for the following reason: Z." Indicates that an application or a user initiated a restart or                  shutdown.
•    Event ID 1076: "The reason supplied by user X for the last unexpected shutdown of this computer    is: Y." Records when the first user with shutdown privileges logs on to the computer after an           unexpected restart or shutdown and supplies a reason for the occurrence.

Note: In case of unexpected shoutdown due to power failure, there would be no event created.

To know the system boot Time:

  C:\systeminfo | find /i “boot time”

That's it... :)