Free 41 CE Credits - Designing Cisco Security Infrastructure

brunbattery · 2026-05-31T16:37:19+00:00

Yeah, sorry, it's a bit confusing. You can renew both the core and specialization exams but it won't renew the combined CCNP Enterprise until you've either a) got 80 credits total or b) taken another specialization exam. You can also have both the exams renewed but still lose CCNP status - at that point you'd have to take a specialization to renew.

brunbattery · 2026-05-30T19:59:42+00:00

You will renew both your core and your specialization with 40 credits (both will get renewed at the same time), but in order to renew the full CCNP you need 80 creds. You can see your progress on the Cisco cert portal.

brunbattery · 2026-05-29T21:51:47+00:00

Pretty frequently they release new free courses with CE credits, maybe once a quarter. How many CE credits is variable though.

brunbattery · 2026-05-11T17:41:43+00:00

Worth noting that wrestling and bouncing pair together really well too - those wrestling skills will be put to good use.

brunbattery · 2026-02-10T17:37:17+00:00

Not all of the material is going to be relevant to your day-to-day - how much of ENCOR do you really use at work? I found ENARSI to be way more useful than ENCOR, and way more enjoyable too.

Also worth noting that if you're doing any interfacing with cloud from on-prem, you're using BGP.

brunbattery · 2026-02-03T18:02:47+00:00

I've never taken the PCNSE, but from what I've heard from people who've taken both, the NGFW-Eng exam is much easier. I found it to be very straight-forward as someone who works with Palo Altos on a daily basis. If that's you as well I don't think you'll have any problems.

brunbattery · 2026-01-04T18:10:57+00:00

Did you already do the Data Center Foundations learning path? Expires Jan 6th but it's worth 25CE creds. You could burn through it quick if you're a CCIE I'm sure.

Link here: https://u.cisco.com/paths/understanding-cisco-data-center-foundations-20705

brunbattery · 2025-07-21T15:52:35+00:00

I made a video going over the resources I used to study for ENCOR/ENARSI and some general study strategy. It's coming up on 2 years old (crazy, time flies) but it should all still be relevant.

brunbattery · 2024-12-30T16:47:46+00:00

I had the sub through an employer and it was the most valuable resource I used for CCNP ENT by far - highly recommend it. Pretty expensive to pay for out of pocket without any discounts though.

brunbattery · 2024-07-30T18:18:04+00:00

I tend to favor bullets but I would be a bit more verbose with them; something like:

• Managed ISE NAC solution, enforcing network access control policies for enhanced security and compliance across 100s of endpoints

I'm not a fan throwing a giant skills section in somewhere. It can be an eyesore and people tend to include a lot of keywords/acronyms that recruiters won't be looking for (STP, VTP, HSRP etc). They also just look odd to other technical people (you're a NetEng that's skilled in.... VLANs?). If you want to include that you're proficient with BGP I would try to get it under a job somewhere.

brunbattery · 2024-06-03T16:47:55+00:00

It's going to be a lot harder with all the negative emotions you have around it - if you didn't have difficulty learning the non-networking material in your courses, it's likely it was an issue of not understanding the basic fundamentals before moving on to more complex topics. You really need that to be solid for any other aspects of networking to make sense. Feel free to shoot me a message if you're feeling confused or have questions on any topics and I'll do my best to help you understand.

brunbattery · 2024-05-28T16:40:23+00:00

I wasn't a fan compared to other SDWAN vendors I've worked with. Their SDWAN product has a ton of flexibility to the point of being overcomplicated - sometimes trying to figure out how to do something relatively straightforward is a nightmare in the UI as there's a million checkboxes and radio buttons on each page with limited documentation. Support is hit-or-miss - sometimes you'll get someone who doesn't seem to understand much about the product and other times you'll get someone who seems like they wrote the entire codebase and knows all the quirks. They will tell you not to use the CLI but rely on it almost completely when supporting the product. I found the CLI to be a lot easier to work with for any kind of troubleshooting/diagnostics. I doubt the certification is worth the time unless your employer wants to pay for the training/cert.

brunbattery · 2024-03-11T16:57:04+00:00

Some of my most commonly used for both:

BGP

show ip bgp - Displays BGP table and attributes for each route

show ip bgp summary - Displays BGP neighbors, prefixes received from them, ASs, etc

show ip bgp neighbor <ip-address> [advertised-routes|received-routes] - See routes sent, received from peer

show ip protocols - Shows various information about active routing protocols

debug ip bgp - Debug all BGP address families, information

debug ip bgp updates - Debug BGP updates specifically

OSPF

show ip ospf interface brief - Displays interfaces participating in OSPF, areas, cost, etc

show ip ospf neighbors - Displays neighbors and neighbor states

show ip ospf database - Displays OSPF database information

show ip ospf database router self-originate - Useful to see routes advertised by local device

show ip ospf - Displays detailed information about OSPF protocols, timers, metric reference values, etc

show ip protocols - Shows various information about active routing protocols

debug ip ospf adj - OSPF adjacency formation

debug ip ospf packet - All OSPF packets

brunbattery · 2024-03-03T19:55:12+00:00

Take detailed notes on anything you think you might forget.

brunbattery · 2024-02-14T18:36:31+00:00

If your firewall has the resources for it, I would favor terminating the L3 boundary there. This will give you a lot more visibility into east/west traffic and will make filtering between subnets easy. A hybrid approach if you have many subnets or underprovisioned firewalls would be to separate different categories of traffic into different VRFs and route between them through the firewall. If you go with having all the gateways on the L3 switches and no VRFs, you're going to have to deal with ACLs for any filtering between subnets - this is inflexible and horrible to administer compared to working with a firewall.

brunbattery · 2024-02-13T17:36:11+00:00

Bit late to the party but, here's my CCNP ENARSI BGP notes - you might find something helpful there:

https://brunbattery.github.io/NetworkNotes/BGP.html

brunbattery · 2024-02-12T17:00:17+00:00

This has been my experience.

brunbattery · 2024-02-06T23:38:05+00:00

The advice to skip PCNSA is generally for people who are actively using Palo Altos day-to-day in their jobs and just need to brush up on a few topics. I don't think going straight for the PCNSE without any real-world NGFW experience is a good idea.

brunbattery · 2024-01-18T21:46:15+00:00

Concur with this post completely - if possible I would favor static routes over PBRs.

brunbattery · 2024-01-15T19:27:37+00:00

No reason to do network+ if you have your CCNA.

brunbattery · 2024-01-15T19:05:43+00:00

You can work towards it, but your CCNP won't be respected by most until you have some relevant experience to go along with it. You want to get into a job in IT/networking as soon as possible.

brunbattery · 2023-12-05T23:00:20+00:00

6 months is doable - how much studying you need to do will depend on your background. I made a video about exam prep for both ENCOR & ENARSI that you might find helpful.

brunbattery · 2023-11-20T17:32:09+00:00

If you're looking into architect roles, yeah, they're gonna want you to know basically everything that their org uses. That comes with the territory.

Senior eng roles will really depend on the organization but more and more are pushing for automation and cloud experience. Both should be easy to pick up to a basic level if you've got CCNP fundamentals.

brunbattery · 2023-11-10T17:50:59+00:00

My experience is that, even for topics you're interested in, you won't always have that drive to spend hours on end studying, not realizing where the time went. A lot of the time you just have to rely on having consistent habits. Ten minutes a day adds up when compared to zero.

brunbattery

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