How hard is the AZ-104 exam?
AZ-104 (Microsoft Azure Administrator) is a hard associate-level exam and a big step up from AZ-900. It asks what you would configure, and what a given configuration will actually do, across identity, governance, storage, compute, networking, monitoring and backup. People who administer Azure day to day typically prepare in four to eight weeks; people who have only read about Azure find it hard, because many questions are easy to answer once you have done the task in the portal and difficult to reason out from memory.
Why AZ-104 questions are hard
AZ-104 is an operations exam. A typical question describes an environment (a subscription, a few virtual networks, some role assignments or storage settings) and asks what a user can do, which setting meets a requirement, or what happens after a change. The answer depends on how Azure behaves, which is hard to guess if you have never watched it behave.
Microsoft lets you open Microsoft Learn during associate exams, but the exam clock keeps running while you browse. It helps with the occasional lookup and does little for a candidate who has to look up most answers.
The topics that trip people up
A handful of areas from the official skills outline account for many wrong answers:
- Access and governance: role assignments at different scopes and how they inherit, and when to use Azure RBAC, Azure Policy or a resource lock to stop a change.
- Networking: virtual network peering (which is not transitive), effective NSG rules when a subnet and a network interface both have a security group, user-defined routes, and service endpoints versus private endpoints.
- Storage: shared access signatures versus stored access policies versus access keys, the redundancy options, and how lifecycle management, soft delete and versioning interact.
- Reading ARM templates and Bicep files: working out what a template deploys, or what to change in it, without running it.
- Backup and recovery: which vault type protects which workload, and what Azure Site Recovery does that Azure Backup does not.
How long it takes to prepare
Microsoft’s audience profile expects familiarity with operating systems, networking, servers and virtualisation, plus experience with PowerShell, the Azure CLI, the portal, ARM templates or Bicep, and Microsoft Entra ID. With that background, four to eight weeks of focused study is typical. Coming from on-premises infrastructure or another cloud, plan on two to three months and do every task in a real Azure subscription as you study it.
The AZ-104 study plan guide linked below breaks that time into phases.
Who finds it hardest
Candidates who go straight from AZ-900 without hands-on practice find it hardest, because AZ-900 teaches what services are for and AZ-104 asks how to configure them. Developers who use a few PaaS services often struggle with networking and identity. Experienced AWS engineers understand the architecture but need time on Azure’s scope hierarchy of management groups, subscriptions and resource groups, and on Entra ID, which has no direct AWS equivalent.
How to tell you are ready
For each topic in the outline, check you can predict the result of a configuration before you apply it, then confirm it in a sandbox subscription. In practice questions, make sure you can say why each wrong option fails the scenario. When you pass full-length timed mocks consistently on the first attempt, book the exam.
Plan your prep
Questions, answered
Source
Exam facts in this guide come from the vendor's published exam guide. Vendors revise these — check the source for the current version before you book.
- Microsoft AZ-104 study guide — Microsoft Learn