Took the PCNSE for the first time in February and failed with a 66% — passing is 70%. Just passed last week at 74%. The difference wasn't how much I studied but how I studied. First time I read through the admin guide and watched some videos. Second time I built a lab and actually configured everything I was reading about.
Panorama is where I lost the most points the first time. Policy hierarchy, template stacks, device groups — I thought I understood it but when questions put you in a multi-tenant scenario it all fell apart. I spent three full weekends just working through Panorama configurations in my home lab before attempt two. App-ID versus URL filtering and how they interact when both are applied in policy also improved my score significantly.
The exam leans heavily on Palo Alto's security best practices, not just feature knowledge. If you know what a feature does but don't know when Palo Alto says you should use it versus an alternative approach, you'll get the scenario questions wrong. That was my main blind spot the first time around.
Lab time is everything for PCNSE. I had 200+ hours in PAN-OS before I sat and still found some scenario questions genuinely hard. You can't fake your way through this one with book knowledge alone.
The Panorama section is brutal for people who haven't used it in production. I borrowed access to a colleague's lab environment specifically for that topic and it made a massive difference in how the hierarchy questions felt.
What materials did you use for the second attempt? I'm four weeks out from my first try and trying to decide whether to add EDU-220 or just focus on more lab time with what I already have.
App-ID vs URL filtering tripped me up constantly in practice tests. The key insight for me was understanding that App-ID runs first and URL filtering is a profile applied within a policy — once that clicked the questions made a lot more sense.
This is exactly what got me too. My first attempt I could pick the right answer half the time but I had no idea why the other three were wrong. Second time around I made myself explain every wrong answer out loud like I was teaching someone else, and that's when stuff actually stuck. If you can't say why an answer is wrong, you don't really know the material yet.
The NAT policy ordering questions especially -- I used to just guess and hope. Once I built it out in my lab and watched traffic hit the wrong rule first, it stopped being abstract. You'll see a scenario question and immediately know which rule fires because you've actually broken it before and fixed it. That's the difference between recognizing an answer and understanding it.
Congrats on passing! I'm actually mid-prep right now and this thread is giving me hope. Just hit 71% on a Palo Alto practice set yesterday which is the first time I've broken 70, so I'm feeling cautiously optimistic. Still shaky on some of the Panorama stuff but it's getting better the more I lab it out.
Planning to sit the real exam in about three weeks. Honestly your point about the lab making the difference resonates because I wasn't retaining anything just reading docs. Actually pushing configs through and breaking things on purpose has made the concepts stick way faster.