AZ-104 study plan: from portal-curious to exam-ready

What makes AZ-104 different from AZ-900

AZ-104 is an operational exam. Questions describe an administrative situation — a storage account with the wrong redundancy, a virtual machine that will not reach a subnet, a role assignment that is not taking effect — and ask what you would do. Recognising the service name gets you nowhere; you need to know how the thing behaves.

That difference should drive the whole plan. Reading is a supporting activity here, not the main one, and any study schedule that does not include a real subscription is going to feel fine right up until the exam.

Phase 1 — Orient and set up your lab (a few days)

Read the skills outline on the certification page and note the weightings: identity and governance and compute are the heaviest areas, storage and networking close behind, monitoring lightest. Answer a short practice session cold to find out where you actually stand rather than where you assume you do.

Then set up somewhere to work. A free Azure account with its starting credit is enough for most of the plan if you are disciplined about deleting resource groups when you finish with them. Get comfortable with both the portal and the command line early — the exam expects fluency in Azure CLI and PowerShell, and cramming syntax in the final week is a miserable way to spend it.

Phase 2 — Study in weight order, hands in the portal (the bulk of the plan)

Take one skills area at a time, heaviest first, and pair every lesson with the corresponding action in your subscription. Read about role-based access control, then assign a role and watch what it does and does not permit. Read about storage redundancy, then create accounts at different tiers and compare what the portal offers you. The point is not to memorise the click path but to build the mental model the questions are testing.

Networking deserves special attention regardless of its weighting, because it is where most administrators' knowledge is shallowest and where the exam's trickier scenarios live: network security group evaluation order, peering and its limits, and name resolution across virtual networks. Drill practice scoped to each area until accuracy stabilises before moving on, and keep earlier areas warm with a daily mixed session.

• Identities and governance: Entra ID objects and groups, role-based access control, policy, and the management-group hierarchy.
• Storage: account types and redundancy options, access tiers, shared access signatures, and file and blob services.
• Compute: virtual machines and their availability options, scale sets, containers, and app hosting.
• Virtual networking: address spaces and subnets, network security groups, peering, load balancing, and DNS.
• Monitoring and maintenance: metrics and alerts, log queries, and backup and recovery.

Phase 3 — Consolidate where the areas overlap (about a week)

AZ-104 questions rarely stay inside one skills area. A virtual machine question turns into a networking question; a storage question turns into an access-control question. This phase is about the seams: work through scenarios that cross areas, and rebuild practice sessions from your incorrect and flagged questions until the crossover cases stop surprising you.

This is also the phase for the question formats. Practise the drag-and-drop ordering and hot-area items deliberately — knowing that a set of steps exists is not the same as knowing their sequence, and the exam will ask for the sequence.

Phase 4 — Mock week: rehearse, then book

Sit full-length timed mocks under genuine conditions. Pacing matters more here than on the fundamentals exam: scenario questions take longer to read, and if the exam form you draw includes a case study you may not be able to return to it after leaving the section. Read the instruction screens rather than assuming the flag-and-return habit applies everywhere.

Between mocks, spend a full session on the incorrect answers. Book when you are clearing the pass mark comfortably across consecutive mocks with different question draws — and keep the subscription open until exam day, because the hands-on fluency decays faster than the reading does.

Signals you are ready

Book the exam when all of these are true:

• Consecutive full-length mocks above the pass mark, across different question draws.
• No skills area lagging — and specifically, networking is not your weakest.
• You can complete a routine administrative task in both the portal and the command line without looking up the syntax.
• Your review pool of incorrect questions is shrinking week over week rather than growing.

Questions, answered