How to prepare for the AZ-104 Azure Administrator exam

The five domains you are studying

AZ-104 measures the working knowledge of an Azure administrator across five areas, and the official skills outline on Microsoft Learn breaks each into specifics — read it first and make it your syllabus:

• Identities and governance: managing users, groups and access in Microsoft Entra ID (the current name for Azure Active Directory), role-based access control, and governance constructs like subscriptions, management groups and policy.
• Storage: configuring storage accounts, access control and security for stored data, and the different storage services and their redundancy options.
• Compute: deploying and managing virtual machines, automating deployments, and running containers and App Service workloads.
• Virtual networking: virtual networks and subnets, name resolution, securing and connecting networks, and load-balancing traffic.
• Monitoring and maintenance: Azure Monitor, alerts, backup and recovery — the operational layer that keeps everything above it healthy.

Why hands-on practice is non-negotiable

AZ-104 is written for people who administer Azure, and the questions reflect it: they describe a scenario — a VM that must be reachable from one subnet but not another, a storage account that needs specific access rules, a user who must manage one resource group and nothing else — and offer several configurations that all sound plausible. Reading about networking tells you what a network security group is; only configuring one, getting it wrong, and fixing it teaches you the behaviour the exam actually probes. Theory-only candidates consistently find the questions harder than the study material suggested.

The fix is cheap and specific: open a free Azure account (Azure offers one with starter credit — check Azure’s site for current terms) and do the tasks, not just read about them. Create and connect virtual machines, build a virtual network with subnets and security rules, set up a storage account and control access to it, create users and groups in Entra ID and assign roles, configure monitoring and alerts. Work in short deliberate sessions — one task done end to end, then torn down to avoid charges — and keep a note of what surprised you, because those surprises are exactly what exam questions are made of.

The study stack that works

Structure the preparation as layers rather than a single resource. Microsoft Learn’s AZ-104 learning path is the free, official backbone — it maps to the skills outline and gives you the conceptual coverage. Interleave it with the hands-on labs above so each domain gets both treatments: read the modules for a domain, then spend a session doing that domain’s tasks in your own subscription. Studying a domain without touching it in the portal is a half-finished pass you will have to repeat.

Then layer on questions. Use practice questions continuously — not saved for the end — because retrieving under question pressure is what converts familiarity into recall, and because wrong answers with good explanations are the fastest gap-finder available. Microsoft publishes its own free practice assessment for AZ-104 on Microsoft Learn, which is worth sitting because it calibrates you against official question style. Finish with full-length timed mock exams under real conditions: they are the only honest readiness test, because they measure pacing and stamina alongside knowledge.

Expect a different exam feel from AWS

If your exam experience so far is AWS, adjust your expectations of the format itself. AWS associate exams are pure multiple choice and multiple response; Microsoft exams use a wider set of interaction types, and AZ-104 can include drag-and-drop items, ordered-step questions and case studies — a shared scenario with several linked questions hanging off it. None of this is harder in substance, but an unfamiliar format costs time and composure on the day if the first time you meet it is in the exam.

The practical preparation is exposure: Microsoft Learn describes the question types you may encounter, and the official practice assessment plus good mock exams will surface most of them. Case studies deserve particular practice because they reward a specific technique — skim the scenario, answer from the questions backwards, and resist re-reading the whole case for every item. Build that habit before exam day, not during it.

Mechanics, booking and the yearly renewal

AZ-104 is delivered by Pearson VUE, online or at a test centre, booked through the exam page on Microsoft Learn. The passing score is 700 out of 1000, Microsoft’s standard scaled pass mark, and pricing varies by country and region — check the official exam page for the current fee where you live rather than relying on any quoted figure.

Once you pass, the certification is valid for one year — but renewal is deliberately light. In the six months before expiry you can take a free, online, unproctored renewal assessment through your Microsoft Learn profile, with unlimited attempts and no fee; pass it and the certification extends without re-sitting the full proctored exam. Treat it as an annual knowledge refresh rather than a burden, set a reminder for your renewal window, and confirm the current process on Microsoft Learn since Microsoft owns and occasionally adjusts it. Our explainer on how Azure certification renewal works covers the details.

When you are actually ready to book

The readiness signal for AZ-104 is the same as for any serious certification exam: consistently passing full-length, timed mock exams with a comfortable margin, across different question sets. One good score is luck; a pattern is evidence. Sit those mocks under real conditions — full duration, no pauses, no notes — because the exam tests pacing across a long paper as much as it tests Azure.

Two additional checks are worth applying before booking. First, can you actually perform the core tasks from each domain in the portal without following a guide — create and secure a VM, build a network, assign access correctly? If not, the scenario questions will find you out. Second, have the explanations for your wrong practice answers stopped surprising you? When mistakes have shifted from “I did not know that” to “I misread the question”, the knowledge work is done and what remains is exam craft.