AZ-104 Azure Administrator certification: a complete guide

What AZ-104 is and who it is for

AZ-104 is Microsoft’s role-based certification for the Azure administrator role — the person who implements, manages and monitors an organisation’s Azure environment. It is a technical exam built around doing rather than defining: the questions assume you have created storage accounts, sized virtual machines, configured network security groups and chased down a misbehaving resource in the portal, not merely read about them.

It suits people who manage Azure day to day, or who are moving into that work: systems administrators extending on-premises skills into the cloud, support engineers stepping up to infrastructure, and IT professionals in Microsoft-centric organisations formalising what they already do. Microsoft recommends real hands-on Azure experience — around six months — before attempting it, and that guidance is honest. The exam’s scenario questions reward the judgement that only comes from having actually operated the platform.

What the exam covers

The AZ-104 blueprint groups its objectives into five broad areas. You do not need to memorise the structure, but preparing against it keeps your study aligned with what is actually asked:

• Manage Microsoft Entra ID identities and governance — users, groups, roles, and the access and policy controls that keep an Azure environment orderly. Entra ID is the current name for what was Azure Active Directory.
• Implement and manage storage — storage accounts, access control, redundancy choices and file shares.
• Deploy and manage Azure compute resources — virtual machines, containers and app services, plus the templates and scaling that keep them repeatable.
• Configure and manage virtual networking — virtual networks, subnets, name resolution, network security and connectivity between environments.
• Monitor and maintain Azure resources — metrics, alerts, log queries, and backup and recovery for the workloads you run.

How it compares to AWS’s associate certifications

If you know the AWS ladder, AZ-104 sits at the same rung as the AWS associates — and its closest analogue is the CloudOps Engineer – Associate, the AWS exam aimed at people operating and administering cloud infrastructure rather than designing it from scratch. Both are hands-on, both assume real platform experience, and both test the operational judgement — monitoring, troubleshooting, access control, cost-aware configuration — that separates an administrator from someone who has only followed tutorials.

The certifications are not interchangeable, because the platforms are not: the services, the identity model and the tooling all differ, and employers hiring for an Azure environment want the Azure credential. But the underlying skills transfer well in both directions. An administrator who holds one will find the other cloud’s concepts familiar, even when every service wears a different name.

Logistics: format, scoring and booking

AZ-104 is delivered by Pearson VUE, either at a test centre or online with remote proctoring, and is booked through the exam page on Microsoft Learn. The passing score is 700 out of 1000 — Microsoft’s standard scaled pass mark. The format varies and can include multiple choice, multiple response, drag-and-drop items and case studies, where a longer scenario feeds several questions; question counts vary between sittings, so do not plan around a fixed number.

Exam pricing varies by country and region, so we will not quote a figure here — check the official AZ-104 exam page on Microsoft Learn for the current fee where you live. There is no formal prerequisite: you do not need AZ-900 first, although beginners often benefit from it as a lower-stakes introduction to Azure’s vocabulary and exam style.

The renewal model: one year, renewed free online

Azure role-based certifications work differently from AWS’s three-year cycle, and AZ-104 is a good place to understand the model. The certification is valid for one year, and you renew it free of charge by passing an online, unproctored renewal assessment in Microsoft Learn — available in the six months before expiry, with unlimited attempts and no fee. There is no re-sitting the full proctored exam and no repeat payment; the renewal is a lighter check that your knowledge has kept pace with the platform.

In practice this trades a longer validity period for a lower-friction upkeep loop: you touch the material every year, but the touch is small and costs nothing. Confirm the current terms on Microsoft Learn, as Microsoft owns and occasionally adjusts the process. Note that this applies to role-based certifications like AZ-104 — Fundamentals certifications such as AZ-900 simply never expire.

How to prepare

Start with Microsoft Learn, which is free and maps directly onto the exam: the official AZ-104 learning path walks through every objective area with documentation and guided exercises. Pair it with a free Azure account so every topic you read becomes something you have actually done — create the virtual network, break the access rule, read the alert. For an exam that assumes six months of hands-on experience, practising in a real subscription is not optional polish; it is the preparation.

Then close the loop with structured revision and realistic practice questions organised by the exam’s domains, so you can see which of the five areas is weakest and drill it deliberately. Scenario judgement — which redundancy option, which role assignment, which monitoring signal — cannot be memorised from a summary sheet; it is built by answering questions, getting them wrong, and understanding why. When you are consistently passing full-length practice sets, book the exam and stop second-guessing.