F5 BIG-IP Troubleshooting — Exam Test: 1500 Questions

Most BIG-IP outages do not start with a clear error message. They start with symptoms: users report timeouts, applications feel slow, connections reset “randomly,” or only certain clients fail. Under pressure, teams often do the worst possible thing: they change multiple settings at once and hope the problem disappears.

That may restore service temporarily, but it destroys your ability to prove root cause and makes the next incident harder.This course exists to replace that chaos with repeatable troubleshooting discipline. It is built for engineers who want to diagnose BIG-IP issues with evidence, not superstition. The goal is to teach you how to think like an operator: observe the symptom, form a testable hypothesis, capture the minimal evidence, validate the failure domain, then apply the smallest safe fix.

This workflow is what experienced teams use to reduce time-to-root-cause while avoiding risky “quick fixes.”You receive six full-length practice sections with two hundred and fifty questions each, for a total of one thousand five hundred questions. The volume matters because troubleshooting is pattern recognition. BIG-IP problems repeat with different masks: routing asymmetry appears as intermittent resets, profile mismatch appears as “the app is flaky,” TLS failures appear as client-specific breakage, and logging gaps appear as “nothing happened.” Repetition trains your eyes to recognize the right clues early and to avoid wasting time on the wrong layer.In the first section, you build a mental model for TMM behavior and fast clues.

You will train how to map symptoms to likely failure domains and how to avoid common traps such as blaming the wrong side of the connection. You will practice reasoning about resets, retransmissions, stalls, and latency signals, and you will learn how to create hypotheses that you can prove or falsify quickly.In the second section, you learn how to make the device tell the truth through logging and evidence collection. You will train what to collect first, where to look, how to adjust verbosity safely, and how to correlate events across subsystems without drowning in noise.

You will practice building a timeline that stands up in incident reviews.In the third section, you go deep into tcpdump/pcap and flow reconstruction. Packet capture is not about collecting huge files. It is about capturing the right interfaces at the right time with the right filters so the PCAP answers the one question you need answered.

You will practice interpreting handshake anomalies, ARP and neighbor clues, missing return traffic, MTU symptoms, and side-specific retransmits. You will learn to reconstruct the story the packets are telling.In the fourth section, you master SSL/TLS troubleshooting. You will train certificate chain and trust issues, SNI and certificate selection, protocol and cipher negotiation, and how to separate client-side termination problems from server-side upstream problems.

You will practice post-rotation incidents, intermediate chain mistakes, and compatibility failures that impact only certain clients. The focus is precise: identify the exact handshake failure point and restore service without weakening security.In the fifth section, you train routing and translation failures that can make healthy applications look broken. You will practice SNAT decisions, route domains, gateway behavior, VLAN constraints, and how asymmetry breaks state.

You will learn to prove return-path issues quickly and to choose corrections that preserve intended security and network design.In the sixth section, you focus on profile mismatch and application-layer surprises—the hidden root causes behind “random” behavior. You will train how HTTP profiles, OneConnect, persistence, timeouts, and iRules can change application behavior in ways that are not obvious. You will learn to identify the exact mismatch, validate it with evidence, then implement a clean correction with minimal blast radius.By the end of this course, you will be able to troubleshoot BIG-IP issues with calm precision.

You will know what to capture, where to look, how to prove the failure domain, and how to fix problems without turning production into an experiment. Root cause is not a feeling. It is a conclusion backed by evidence.

That is what this course trains.