published: 1st of November 2019
I recently passed the JNCIS Service Provider (JN0-361) certification exam on my second attempt. This post will cover the materials and methods I used to tackle this exam.
Juniper had a free cert day on the 17th of September 2019 here in Australia. From the time it was announced I only had two weeks to study for this exam and I was not very confident of passing but decided to go for it as it was basically a free look at the exam. I failed, but I got very close to passing, probably within a question or two based on the score report. This gave me the confidence to stick with it and I booked a resit for the 31st of October which was the earliest day I could get and in hindsight was a bit of a blessing in disguise.
The Juniper day one library is an amazing resource. Its great for picking up a topic quickly and there is a vast number of high quality books on offer for the low, low cost of .... FREE! I read all or the relevant parts of the following books.
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| This week: Deploying MPLS | Tim Fiola and Jamie Panagos |
| Day one MPLS up and running | Nupur Kanoi |
| Day one: MPLS for enterprise engineers | Darren J. S. O'Connor |
| Day one: Routing the internet protocol | Martin Brown & Nick Ryce |
| JNCIS-SP Study Guide-Part 1/2/3 | Unknown Author(s) |
There is not a lot of video content out there for the Juniper Service Provider track. I did use the following video tutorial series which were very helpful.
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| Juniper JNCIS-ENT (JN0-343) - CBT Nuggets | Anthony Sequeira |
| Introduction to MPLS - INE | Keith Bogart |
The Juniper genius app has two JNCIS-SP practice exams. I completed them both getting 75% and 73% respectively. Any question I had to guess, got wrong or was unsure about I wrote down and went back and researched the topic more.
I did not find this out until the last week before my exam when I was going through the practice tests. There is a JNCIS-SP video based training available on the genius and if I were to start the process again I would go through this training. Check it out, its a great resource and its FREE!
I mainly read the the Juniper docs on GRE/IP-IP and NSR/GRES. There was also plenty of reading the docs for examples of configuring all the required protocols.
I used my vendor agnostic lab topology and also added automated provisioning via the Nornir framework. This allowed me to really drill out topics without wasting time configuring boilerplate.
All up I spent about 8 weeks studying for this exam. This included approximately 10-12 hours a week of reading/researching and 10-16 hours of labbing. I am also currently working with a customer that has a large network with a lot of Juniper devices. Day to day config and troubleshooting certainly didnt hurt my preparation.
I did take a lot of notes as part of my preparation. I did not have time to turn them into articles. When I get time I will create them and update this section.
As with the JNCIA-Junos exam I found the JNCIS-SP to be a fair exam. The questions were very relevant to operating juniper network devices without being vague or esoteric. In a way I am glad I failed the first attempt as it forced me to dig deeper and understand the subject matter more thoroughly. This is as far as I am going with certifications this year. Time/need permitting, 2020 may be the year of the JNCIP-SP.