Glimpses of Daniel's world

M202 July 2014 First week

The course has started and immediately I noticed how much I already forgot. I haven't practiced my MongoDB DBA skills and feel embarrassed at how little I do remember.

Mongo University changes

The Mongo University changed a lot since the last time I took a course. Looking back through my blog posts it has been almost a year since I completed a course, slightly less on obtaining a Mongo DBA certificate (free from the pilot program).

In the updated M102 course there's a chapter dedicated to the MongoDB  Monitoring Management Service (MMS). Another change to Mongo University courses is a tool called MongoProc. It's a graphical improvement over the Python scripts that used to verify results. Yeah, I would say it looks more professional even if the GUI still isn't as polished as it could be.

The lessons

At first I guessed all lessons starting with MMS in the title could just be from M102. Once I started the best practices video I knew it was a M202 lesson already.

After going through the videos I got a basic idea of what's going on. It was hard to find an online description or proper documentation on monitoring and best practices so I hope this course gets me that information. Somehow I feel I actually need to retake the M102 course, there's probably a lot of changes to it by now.

Doing the homework

The first thing I did was log in and try to pass installing MongoProc, this assignment is a quiz so there's no limit of tries. I was afraid to immediately hit the test button of the first homework assignment, because I wasn't sure if it will count as a try even though there's a "turn in" button next to it. There's only three tries, don't wanna waste any this early just to test what a button does.

Perhaps I was tired, but I had trouble figuring out how the instructor got the replica set in the first homework assignment. I ended up matching my setup to what I saw in the video.

Over the weekend I struggled with homework assignment 1.2 which generates some data for the metrics in MMS. It seemed not a lot was happening and the feedback of the MongoProc tool is insufficient enough to make you worry if things are still working. It's when I was about to give up on this course that I switched from a Mac host for the given VM to a Windows host. This seemed to work better, but I threw away the previous data so I can't compare it anymore. At least I got to pass all homework assignments.

The start of this course was a little unpleasant for me, hopefully this feeling won't stay throughout the coming weeks.