Your team can be running live lab scenarios in under 10 minutes
Pinecrest Labs gives sysadmins access to real infrastructure they can break, fix, and learn from. Small cohorts. Working instructors. A 14-day trial that includes everything — no paywalls, no feature gates.
Trial converts to paid only if you choose to continue. Reminder sent on day 12. No auto-billing.
47s
Avg. lab provisioning time
2,460
Admins trained since 2020
97%
Trial-to-paid conversion
4.9/5
Post-course satisfaction
PICK THE PROBLEM YOU NEED FIXED
Each track targets a specific operational gap. The labs are built from real outage patterns, not textbook exercises.
Incident Triage & War Rooms
Your pager fires at 3 AM. Now what? Six weeks of structured triage, escalation protocols, and post-incident review. Labs simulate DNS cascades, certificate expiry chains, and storage exhaustion. You build a runbook you can actually use the next time things go sideways — because they will.
6 weeks · from CA$1,950 per seat
Zero-Downtime Migrations
Moving 200 mailboxes without losing a weekend. Relocating a database cluster while the application stays live. Ten weeks of planning, staging, cutover, and rollback drills. The capstone is a full migration blueprint for a fictional 250-seat org — and roughly a third of our graduates tell us it went straight into production planning. Fair warning: this track is the hardest. About 12% of students say it pushed them past their comfort zone. They're right. That's the point.
10 weeks · from CA$2,700 per seat
Security Hardening for Ops
Not a pen-testing course. This is for the admin who keeps getting pulled into security conversations without formal training. Patch cadence, access control audits, log analysis, endpoint policy. Practical and compliance-aware. We built it with two regulated-industry CISOs — they still review updates each quarter.
8 weeks · from CA$2,400 per seat
Observability & Capacity
When do you add another node? How do you tell genuine slowdown from noisy metrics? Alert fatigue reduction, dashboard architecture, and forecasting models that don't require a stats degree. Shorter and denser than the other tracks.
6 weeks · from CA$1,850 per seat
All prices in CAD, exclude GST/PST. Volume discounts at 5+ seats. Employer-invoiced billing available.
HOW IT WORKS
Sign up for the trial
Name and email. That's it. Lab credentials arrive in under 10 minutes. No credit card. No contract. 14 full days of access.
Explore the labs
152 scenarios across four tracks. Real servers, real configs. Break things on purpose — that's how the learning sticks. We've had people solve 20 labs in the first weekend. Others take it slow. Both approaches work.
Enrol in a cohort
Pick a track. Pick a start date. Live sessions twice weekly, evening PT. Max 14 per class. Instructors carry pagers during the week — not career teachers reading slides.
Ship a capstone
A working deployment, runbook, or migration plan. Not a quiz. Show it in interviews, present it to your manager, or — and this happens more than you'd think — put it directly into production.
WHAT TEAMS MEASURED AFTER FINISHING
61% fewer
repeat escalations in Q1 after the incident track.
“Our L2 team used to bounce everything upward. After the triage labs they started closing things themselves. The runbook templates alone justified the spend — and I'm not someone who says that lightly about training budgets.”
Naomi Xu · VP Engineering, Halyard Health Solutions
8 weeks
from kickoff to completed cloud migration, 210-user org.
“We'd been putting off the migration for over a year. The Pinecrest track gave our team a playbook instead of just hope. Finished ahead of schedule — which, yeah, was a first for this department.”
Owen Sinclair · IT Director, Lakeridge Credit Union
3 promotions
within 5 months among a 6-person enrolled team.
“Honestly? I only signed up because my manager pushed me. But the capstone project ended up being the thing that got me the senior ops role. Wouldn't have happened otherwise.”
Anika Devi · Senior Sysadmin, Westbridge Logistics
QUESTIONS WE HEAR A LOT
What happens after the 14-day trial?
Nothing automatic. Lab access pauses. We send a reminder on day 12. If you want to continue, you pick a cohort and pay. If not, your account sits idle — no charge, no nagging. Some people come back months later. That's fine.
How much time per week?
About 8 to 10 hours. Two 90-minute sessions, plus lab work and reading. The observability track is closer to 7. Most students do it alongside a full-time job.
Can my employer be invoiced?
Yes. About 72% of our students use employer billing. Volume discounts start at five seats. We also have a justification letter template — ask during the trial.
Is the credential government-accredited?
No. We're upfront about that. The capstone is a working artefact — a deployment, a runbook — you can show in interviews. The credential carries weight among ops teams who know our programme. If your HR department needs a specific accreditation stamp, talk to us first so there are no surprises.
What if I need to pause?
One free deferral to the next cohort. CA$250 re-enrolment after that. On-call emergencies happen. We get it.
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START YOUR 14-DAY FREE TRIAL
Full lab access, no credit card, no commitment. After 14 days your access pauses unless you choose to enrol.
Prefer a call? +1 604-265-7391 · Mon–Fri 09:00–17:30 PT