F5 BIG-IP LTM Specialist: Maintain and Troubleshoot (Exam 301b)

Application delivery issues can become business outages when BIG-IP LTM skills are concentrated in too few senior engineers. This intermediate F5 course gives network security admins a structured path through the operational work that keeps BIG-IP environments stable: TCP profiles, configuration consolidation, upgrades, SNMP, syslog and email alerting, iRules, AVR, HTTPS troubleshooting, monitors, device issues, and HA/failover.

IT Directors and Team Leads should assign this to BIG-IP administrators or network security admins with roughly 3–5 years of enterprise network security experience, especially teams supporting production application delivery. The time investment is about 11 hours per learner, plus any internal lab, change-window, or exam review time. For change management, this course is best used before upgrade cycles, HA reviews, or troubleshooting ownership transitions so procedures are understood before incidents occur.

CBT Nuggets Playlists help standardize the rollout by role, while Team Reporting gives Training Managers visibility into completion progress across the team.

IT teams complete this training to improve the day-to-day reliability and supportability of F5 BIG-IP LTM environments. The course maps to common production responsibilities: maintaining traffic behavior, preparing upgrades, improving visibility, and troubleshooting application performance or availability issues.

• Reduce troubleshooting time: Build shared working knowledge of application and HTTPS troubleshooting, HTTP headers, SSL/TLS handshakes, slowness, and monitor selection.
• Improve operational visibility: Configure and understand SNMP, syslog, email alerting, and AVR so teams can detect and investigate issues more consistently.
• Lower change risk: Prepare admins to consolidate configurations and approach BIG-IP upgrades with a clearer understanding of operational impact.
• Strengthen uptime practices: Review LTM device issues, high availability, and failover so support teams can respond more effectively during service-impacting events.

Knowledge

• How TCP profiles affect BIG-IP LTM traffic behavior.
• Configuration consolidation concepts for maintaining cleaner BIG-IP deployments.
• BIG-IP upgrade considerations covered in the course curriculum.
• Monitoring and alerting options, including SNMP, syslog, email alerting, and AVR.
• HTTP headers, SSL/TLS handshake concepts, and their role in HTTPS troubleshooting.
• High availability, failover, and LTM device issue concepts.

Ability

• Troubleshoot application and HTTPS issues in BIG-IP LTM environments.
• Investigate slowness and select appropriate monitors based on the scenario.
• Work with iRules as part of LTM traffic management and troubleshooting workflows.
• Use monitoring and alerting data to support faster incident response.
• Support BIG-IP maintenance tasks such as upgrades and configuration review.
• Prepare for the F5 BIG-IP LTM Specialist Maintain and Troubleshoot exam 301b.