The “Troubleshooting and Maintaining Cisco IP Networks (TSHOOT) 1.0” course is the capstone course of the Cisco CCNP certification. This course teaches students to troubleshoot problems in IP networks through a series of practical lab scenarios. The course focuses on practicing structured troubleshooting methods.
Exam Preparation
The TSHOOT exam contains a series of simulated troubleshooting scenarios. To get a feel for the user interface and style of these questions you can go through an exam demo and tutorial published by Cisco on the Cisco Learning Network. This same page also contains links to the actual topology that is used during the test. I strongly recommend reviewing these items before taking the TSHOOT exam.
Additional Troubleshooting References
The following sites contain references to presentations and articles relating to network troubleshooting:
- The Network Engineer’s Guide to Making Changes: This blog post is an interesting overview of common issues around making changes and change control.
- How to properly and safely collect debugs on an IOS router: This article gives detailed guidelines on collecting debug output from routers.
Cisco Live Online
Cisco Live Online (free registration required) is a great free resource for all things Cisco. It contains the session presentations from past Cisco Live events in PDF format. In addition to the PDFs, there are recordings for many of the sessions that you can review at your leisure. The Cisco Live archives contain a large number of sessions that focus on troubleshooting various Cisco products and technologies. The following sessions supplement the topics that are covered in the course:
- BRKCRT-3217 – How to Prepare for the Tshoot CCNP Exam (2011 Las Vegas)
- BRKCRT-3329 – Sun Tzu: CCIE R&S and the Art of Troubleshooting – The Campaign (2011 Las Vegas)
- BRKARC-2002 – Network Diagnosis: Prevent Prepare Repair (2012 San Diego)
- BRKCRS-3090 – Implementing Network Automations (2012 San Diego)
- BRKRST-2331 – The Care and Feeding of EIGRP Networks (2012 San Diego)
- BRKRST-3310 – Troubleshooting OSPF (2012 San Diego)
- BRKRST-3320 – Troubleshooting BGP (2012 San Diego)
- BRKRST-2302 – IPv6 Troubleshooting (2012 San Diego)
- BRKCRS-3141 – Troubleshooting Cisco Catalyst 3750 3560 and 2960 Series Switches (2012 San Diego)
- BRKCRS-3142 – Troubleshooting Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Switches (2012 San Diego)
- BRKCRS-3143 – Troubleshooting Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches (2012 San Diego)