Azure Administrator Certification Guide

A full AZ-104 exam guide for IT admins — the five domains, hands-on skills Microsoft expects, format, cost, renewal and a prep strategy that works.

Daniel Carter30 August 2026 · 10 min read

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Administrator at a console with five control panels representing the five AZ-104 exam domains.

Picture a systems administrator with three years of on-premises Windows Server experience whose company has just committed to moving workloads into Azure. Her manager wants evidence she can run the new environment — identities, storage, virtual machines, networking, monitoring — and the credential that maps almost exactly onto that job description is Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate, earned by passing one exam: AZ-104, Microsoft Azure Administrator.

While Microsoft has retired or replaced a striking number of role-based certifications through 2025 and 2026 — AZ-204, AI-102 and DP-100 among them — AZ-104 has emerged untouched. As of August 2026 it carries no retirement warning, its content was refreshed in April 2026, and it remains the anchor of the Azure operations track: it is also the mandatory prerequisite for the Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification and one of the qualifying routes into DevOps Engineer Expert. If you are going to build an Azure career on one associate exam, this is the one Microsoft has built everything else around.

This guide covers the exam itself: what the five domains demand, the hands-on skills Microsoft expects you to bring, the format, cost and renewal mechanics, and how to prepare. It deliberately stays out of three neighbouring questions our sibling articles own: how difficult the exam feels in practice is examined in How hard is the Azure Administrator exam?, whether the certification pays off for your profile is weighed in Is the Azure Administrator certification worth it?, and a full week-by-week study programme lives in How to prepare for the Azure Administrator certification.

The certification, the exam and the role — how they fit together

The naming trips people up, so let's be precise. Azure Administrator Associate is the certification — a role-based Microsoft credential at associate level. AZ-104 is the single exam that earns it. The role it certifies is the day-to-day operator of an Azure environment: the person who implements, manages and monitors identity, governance, storage, compute and virtual networks in a Microsoft Azure tenant.

Requirements, in the formal sense, are lighter than many candidates assume:

No prerequisite certifications. You can sit AZ-104 without AZ-900 or anything else. Whether you should skip the fundamentals step depends on your background — a decision covered in Azure Fundamentals vs Azure Administrator.
No formal experience requirement, but Microsoft recommends hands-on familiarity with PowerShell, the Azure CLI, the Azure portal, Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates and Bicep, and Microsoft Entra ID. That recommendation is honest: AZ-104 is written for practitioners, and reading-only preparation is the most common way to fail it.
Renewal, not re-examination. The certification expires after one year, but renewal is free: an unproctored, open-book online assessment on Microsoft Learn, available in the six months before expiry and retakeable without limit. You pay for the exam once; you never pay to keep it.

The five AZ-104 domains, and what each one really asks of you

Microsoft's certification page lists five skill domains. The official percentage weightings are published in the AZ-104 study guide — check the current version there rather than trusting figures repeated on forums — but the domain list itself is stable, and each rewards a different kind of preparation.

Manage Azure identities and governance

This domain covers Microsoft Entra ID objects (users, groups, devices), role-based access control, and governance constructs: subscriptions, management groups, Azure Policy, resource locks and tags. In practice it tests whether you can answer "who can do what, where, and how do we enforce it" questions about a tenant.

Study interpretation: RBAC scope inheritance and the difference between Entra roles and Azure roles are the concepts to master until they are reflexive. Governance questions tend to be scenario-shaped, so practise choosing between policy, locks and RBAC as enforcement tools rather than memorising each in isolation.

Implement and manage storage

Storage accounts, access control to blobs and files, redundancy options, and data-movement tooling. The exam expects you to reason about which redundancy level, access tier and security mechanism fits a stated requirement.

Study interpretation: build the decision tables yourself — redundancy options against durability and failover behaviour, shared access signatures against role assignments against access keys. Making those trade-off calls quickly is worth more than knowing any single feature deeply.

Deploy and manage Azure compute resources

Virtual machines and their availability options, disks, scale sets, and the deployment side: ARM templates and Bicep, plus container and App Service basics from an administrator's perspective.

Study interpretation: this is where template literacy matters. You do not need to author complex Bicep from scratch, but you should read a template and predict what it deploys, and know how VM availability constructs differ. Deploy a VM every way you can — portal, CLI, PowerShell, template — because the exam happily switches tooling mid-scenario.

Implement and manage virtual networking

Virtual networks and subnets, network security groups, peering, DNS, load balancing and private access to services. For candidates without a networking background this is consistently the most demanding domain, dense with concepts that interact: effective NSG rules, routing behaviour, name resolution paths.

Study interpretation: draw the topologies. Most networking questions are really "trace the path" puzzles, and candidates who sketch — even mentally — outperform those who memorise rule tables. If your networking is shaky, front-load this domain in your plan; it needs the most repetition.

Monitor and maintain Azure resources

Azure Monitor, alerts, metrics and logs, backup and recovery. Smaller in scope but easy to under-prepare because it comes last in every course. Know what each monitoring signal is for and how backup and restore actually behave, not just that the services exist.

Exam format, cost and scoring

AZ-104 is a proctored, 100-minute exam delivered through Pearson VUE, at a test centre or online from home, and it may include interactive components — Microsoft's Exam Sandbox shows the question styles in advance, and it is worth an hour of any candidate's time. Microsoft does not publish a question count for the exam; only the time limit is official, so ignore any resource asserting a specific number.

Scoring follows the standard Microsoft model: 1 to 1,000, pass at 700, and the score is scaled — 700 is emphatically not 70%, because scaling accounts for question difficulty across exam forms. Pricing is set by country or region; third-party sources commonly cite US$165 for associate-level exams in the United States, but confirm the fee for your region on the exam page when you book. If you fail, you can retake after 24 hours, with longer waits for subsequent attempts.

Logistics	AZ-104
Certification	Azure Administrator Associate
Duration	100 minutes, proctored
Passing score	700/1,000 (scaled)
Prerequisites	None formal; hands-on experience recommended
Cost	Varies by country (US$165 commonly cited, associate tier)
Validity	1 year; free online renewal assessment
Unlocks	Prerequisite for AZ-305; qualifying route for AZ-400

How to prepare: a strategy in six moves

The full study programme, with resources and lab sequencing, is its own article — linked above. What belongs in this guide is the strategic shape, because AZ-104 punishes candidates who prepare it like a theory exam.

Anchor on the official study guide. Download the current AZ-104 study guide from Microsoft Learn and turn its skill outline into your checklist. Every hour of study should map to a line in it.
Get a subscription you can break. A free or low-cost Azure subscription is non-negotiable. Microsoft explicitly recommends experience with the portal, PowerShell, the CLI, and ARM/Bicep — those are lab skills, and the exam's interactive components reward people who have actually clicked and typed these things.
Study domain by domain, lab immediately. Read or watch a topic, then reproduce it in your own tenant the same day. Configure the NSG; don't just diagram it. Deferred labs are abandoned labs.
Rotate your tooling deliberately. For each recurring task, do it once in the portal, once in the CLI or PowerShell. The exam assumes an administrator who is not tied to one interface.
Benchmark with timed practice. Once the domains are covered, take full-length, timed practice tests and analyse the results per domain. A weak domain identified two weeks before exam day is a study plan; identified in the exam, it is a resit. ExamPractice offers free sample AZ-104 practice questions, with fuller sets and a timed simulation mode for subscribers — use the simulation to rehearse the 100-minute pacing, and treat every wrong answer as a pointer back to a study-guide line, never as an answer to memorise.
Close weak domains, then book. Retest until your practice results are consistent across all five domains. Booking on a single lucky score is the second most common self-inflicted failure after skipping labs.

Mistakes that cost AZ-104 candidates their exam fee

Preparing without a lab. The recurring theme of this guide, because it is the recurring cause of failure. AZ-104 is a practitioner's exam; video courses alone build recognition, not the recall-under-pressure the interactive question styles demand.
Ignoring networking until the end. The heaviest conceptual domain gets the least energy when it is scheduled last. Front-load it.
Studying from outdated material. The exam content was updated in April 2026, and Microsoft revises regularly. Check any course's stated alignment date against the current study guide, and trust the study guide when they disagree.
Chasing question-count and pass-rate rumours. Microsoft publishes neither. Time-box to 100 minutes and prepare all domains; the rest is noise.
Confusing AZ-104 with its retired ancestors. Older exams AZ-100, AZ-103 and the AZ-102 transition exam appear in legacy study materials and forum posts; they are historical. AZ-104 is the current administrator exam, and material written for its predecessors will teach you a certification that no longer exists.

Are you ready to book? A quick checklist

You can create and scope a role assignment, and predict which permissions win when scopes conflict.
You can choose a storage redundancy level and access-control method from a written requirement, and justify it.
You have deployed a VM via portal, command line and template, and know your availability options.
You can trace traffic through NSGs, peering and load balancing on a topology you have drawn yourself.
You know which monitoring tool answers which question, and have configured backup and tested a restore.
Your timed practice results are consistently strong across all five domains, not carried by two of them.

If any line makes you hesitate, that hesitation is your remaining study plan.

Frequently asked questions

Can I take AZ-104 online from home?

Yes. Like all Microsoft certification exams, AZ-104 is delivered by Pearson VUE both at test centres and via online proctoring. Home delivery demands a private, quiet room, a webcam check-in and a stable connection for the full 100 minutes; if you cannot guarantee an uninterrupted environment, book a test centre — proctoring interruptions can void an attempt.

How long should I study for AZ-104?

Microsoft publishes no official study-hours figure, and any number you see quoted is someone's anecdote. The honest answer is experience-dependent: an administrator already working in Azure daily needs mostly gap-filling and exam-format practice, while a candidate coming from on-premises infrastructure should budget for substantial lab time on top of the reading. Let consistent practice-test results across all five domains — not a calendar date — decide when you book.

Is the renewal assessment as hard as the exam?

No, and it is a different kind of event entirely: the annual renewal is a free, unproctored, open-book online assessment on Microsoft Learn, retakeable as many times as needed within the six-month window before your certification expires. It exists to confirm you have kept up with platform changes, not to re-examine you from scratch.

Does AZ-104 cover exactly the same ground as the old AZ-103?

No. AZ-103 (and AZ-100/AZ-101 before it) certified earlier iterations of the administrator role and retired years ago; AZ-104's objectives have been revised repeatedly since, most recently in April 2026. Study only against the current AZ-104 study guide.

Where AZ-104 takes you next

Azure Administrator Associate is rarely a terminus. Its most important structural property in Microsoft's 2026 portfolio is that it is the mandatory prerequisite for Azure Solutions Architect Expert — passing AZ-305 alone does not award that certification without AZ-104 behind it — and it is now the practical qualifying route into DevOps Engineer Expert as well, since the alternative AZ-204 path has been retired. Both continuations are mapped, alongside the rest of the portfolio, in the Azure certifications roadmap, and the architect step has its own dedicated guide in the Azure Solutions Architect AZ-305 guide.

For the systems administrator from our opening scenario, the sequence is clear: study the five domains hands-on, benchmark honestly, pass AZ-104 — and hold the one associate certification the rest of the Azure ladder is built on.

Exam facts in this guide were checked against official certification-provider pages on 30 August 2026. Fees, exam codes and policies change — confirm on the provider’s own site before you book.