Red Hat Certified Specialist in Services Management and Automation

 March 31, 2021

Late last year, I’ve read that a new Ansible-related exam was available: the Red Hat Certified Specialist in Services Management and Automation exam (EX358). I’ve taken and passed this exam at the end of January. It was the first time I did a Red Hat exam that was brand new and without having the possibility of finding online some opinions around it.

Some people have reported for other exams that when new exams are launched, the scoring has issues. I’ve not noticed such an issue with this exam, so I was pleased about it.

One thing that is not completely clear from the official exam page is that the Ansible documentation is avaiable as for the Red Hat Certified Engineer (EX294) exam and the Red Hat Certified Specialist in Advanced Automation: Ansible Best Practices (EX 447) exam.

A crucial aspect I would focus on is a sentence on the official Red Hat website “Candidates should be prepared to perform these tasks both manually and using Ansible automation”. More specifically, I think it is essential to put a lot of emphasis on the “[…] both manually and using Ansible automation” part. The “AND” is of critical importance since it will be the exam that will dictate if a particular exercise will need to be performed with Ansible or without it. That is why it is critical to know all procedures with and without Ansible to be able to perform the task in the way the exam dictates easily.

Overall, the experience was very positive. I would suggest it to anyone who knows well Linux and Ansible to consider this exam if you want to achieve RHCA or just want to test their expertise in the subject.

 Ansible, Red Hat

 Certification, Infrastructure as Code

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Comments

Leszek on 2021-04-16 12:19:18 UTC said:

Can you share a hint - should I expect to face tasks to do things from scratch, so prepare hosts (accounts, passwordless communication etc), inventory, ansible config, then create new playbooks, or in case of non-ansible tasks - install binaries, prepare config files etc, rather than extend some configuration that are already started, but of course not completed ? Only four hours to go through complete list “Candidates should be prepared to perform these tasks both manually and using Ansible automation.” in a mode “doing everything from scratch” seems to be very hard task. And how about the docs you mentioned - was it not available offline during the exam ?

Fabio Alessandro Locati on 2021-04-16 14:20:23 UTC said:

Some tasks are to be done completely from scratch, other are already partially implemented and you only need to complete them. This means that you need to be fully aware and prepared to make the completely, but for time reason (I believe) sometimes you’ll skip steps already implemented.

As for the time, I’ve not had any issue to the point that I completed my exam with more than 1 hour spare, I re-checked everything I did, and still terminated everything with more than half our spare. Surely it is important to be able to do all the procedures from your mind and require very sporadic access to the documentation, because - at least in my experience - accessing the documentation slows down the execution. Also, consider that - being an exam with only 4 hours available - you will not be examined on everything that you need to know for the exam, but everything you will be examined upon is in that list.

The documentation you have during the exam is the inline one (the -h option many commands have), the linux man, and Ansible docs in an offline format. The tools internal research feature does work, while Google search or other similar tools are not available.

I hope this clarify more the context of the exam, and good luck!

Leszek on 2021-04-16 19:16:17 UTC said:

Thank you very much for your answers. Definitely it makes a difference in time required to complete a task between case when you got a config file and you are to complete it, and ie. prepare a jinja2 templates… In regards to looking at docs, well I was setting up several times dns, web servers as http https or reverse proxy, nfs, configuring bonds teams etc but I do daily lots of different things and definitely need to look at –help or man so 4 hours sounds short to me. Well, thing goes its way, I had two attempts to 447. In first ran out of time and got 206. In second finished far ahead of schedule, and after recheck still had more than half of an hour. Got 300 but in second attempt… Printers, varnish, iscsi are absolutely new topics for me. Well, we will see. Thx again.

Fabio Alessandro Locati on 2021-04-16 21:05:29 UTC said:

One suggestion that I can give you that I learned over time is to try with grep to increase your speed consulting the documentation. Let’s say you want to specify on ansible command line the option to configure the number of forks. You can use ansible --help | grep fork and it will give you one line of output with the answer you were looking for. Sometimes you need the lines around the one that is matching and you can do so using grep -B and -A options. This is also doable with man. This method is not always perfect, but a lot of times you can find what you are looking for in way less time, in the other cases, you can revert to the normal usage of these tools.

Good luck with your exam!

Leszek on 2021-07-15 20:57:35 UTC said:

I have finished mine only 3 minutes before the end of time for that exam. Maybe I spent to much time on ensuring that everything is O’Kay. Yes, for sure it is the reason. It was THE waist of time. Especially when I take into account that … RH will never stop to surprise me. Only 267 / 300 … mostly because of 33% (!!!!!), 50%, 50% and 75% for tasks where I was much more than absolutely sure, there will be 100% for each and every. I am pretty tired of this one. I was moving exam date several times… I got retake voucher available, but I think I will not use it. . Anyway, you were right, the “AND” you mentioned is more than important. I have seen another opinion on internet - make an attempt only when you are really prepared, as there is a number of tasks to complete… I do agree with that one also. . All the best to you and to all that are planning to make an attempt to EX358 ! . To those, facing EX358 - calm down, trust to yourself, do not check same thing to many times, as time is always against us.

Fabio Alessandro Locati on 2021-07-16 07:12:05 UTC said:

It is true that 267/300 might be lower than what your preparation was, but I think that having passed it is already a very good achievement! On the scoring side I think it’s always tricky. Those tests are scored automatically so - effectively - the script has to do something and as a result output a score. This is something I’m always focused when I do those kind of exams. How would I write a scoring script for the script to evaluate the exercise I’m solving? I think this is a helpful prospective, mainly when reviewing the exercises.