Azure Administrator Study Plan

Picture a service-desk analyst who has reset passwords in Microsoft Entra ID and restarted the odd virtual machine, but has never built a virtual network or written a line of Bicep. She books the AZ-104 exam eight weeks out, studies most weekdays, and passes — not because she read more than anyone else, but because every week of her plan had a job to do and a way to check it got done. This article gives you that plan.

Microsoft publishes no official study-hour figure for AZ-104, and honest preparation timelines vary enormously with experience — so what follows is a structure you stretch or compress, not a promise. The schedule below assumes roughly eight weeks. If you administer Azure daily, you may fold weeks together; if the cloud is new to you, double a week wherever the checkpoint tells you to.

Two boundaries before we start. This plan sequences when to study each area — the detailed content of every exam domain is unpacked in our AZ-104 exam topics breakdown, and the mechanics of using mock exams well (scoring benchmarks, error logs, timing drills) live in the AZ-104 practice test strategy guide. Keep both open alongside this schedule.

Before week 1: set up your foundations

A study plan fails quietly when the groundwork is missing. Spend a few days on four preparations:

1. Read the official study guide. Download the current AZ-104 study guide (aka.ms/AZ104-StudyGuide) from Microsoft. It lists every skill measured and the current domain weightings, and the exam content was last updated on 17 April 2026 — verify your other materials postdate that refresh.
2. Get a lab environment. AZ-104 expects hands-on ability with the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, the Azure CLI and ARM/Bicep templates. A personal Azure subscription (new accounts typically come with trial options — check current terms on Microsoft's site) plus the sandbox environments built into Microsoft Learn modules will carry you through this plan. Set a spending budget and cost alerts on day one; it is also your first governance lesson.
3. Choose one primary learning resource. Microsoft Learn's free AZ-104 learning paths are the natural spine because they map directly to the skills outline. A video course or book can supplement, but pick a single spine so progress is measurable.
4. Book a provisional exam date. The exam runs 100 minutes through Pearson VUE, at a test centre or online proctored, with pricing that varies by country. A date on the calendar converts a vague intention into a deadline — and Microsoft's retake policy (first retake available after 24 hours, with longer waits for later attempts) means a miss is recoverable, not catastrophic.

How to weight your hours

Whatever your total weekly time, split it deliberately: roughly half in the lab actually doing tasks, the rest divided between structured learning (reading or video) and review or self-testing. AZ-104 is an operational exam; the skills outline is written in verbs — configure, deploy, manage — and passive reading alone does not build the recall those verbs demand.

Weeks 1–2: identity, governance and your working environment

Goal: finish these two weeks able to administer users, roles and governance controls without documentation.

• Week 1 — Entra ID and RBAC. Work through identity fundamentals: create users and groups, experiment with group types and membership rules, assign licences, invite a guest user. Then move to role-based access control: assign built-in roles at different scopes (subscription, resource group, resource) and observe how inheritance behaves. In the lab, set yourself concrete tasks — "give this account read-only access to one resource group and prove it can't delete anything".
• Week 2 — governance and subscriptions. Cover management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, tags, resource locks and Azure Policy. Practical exercises: apply a lock and attempt a deletion; write a policy that requires a tag; move a resource between resource groups. Alongside the portal, repeat key tasks in PowerShell and the CLI so the command-line syntax starts becoming familiar early rather than being crammed late.

Checkpoint: by the end of week 2 you should be able to explain, from memory, how a role assignment's scope determines what a user can do, and demonstrate three governance controls in your own subscription. If not, extend by a few days before moving on — identity and governance concepts underpin questions in every other domain.

Weeks 3–4: storage, then compute

Goal: the two "resource-heavy" domains, each anchored to lab builds you keep for later weeks.

• Week 3 — storage. Create storage accounts with different redundancy options; upload blobs and move them between access tiers; configure a lifecycle management policy; generate shared access signatures and test what they do and do not permit; set up an Azure Files share; copy data with AzCopy. Storage questions reward configuration detail, so keep notes on the decisions each task forced you to make.
• Week 4 — compute. Deploy virtual machines through the portal, then redeploy the same design from an ARM or Bicep template — reading and modifying templates is an expected skill, and doing it once teaches more than a week of reading about it. Cover availability options, disks and VM sizing, then branch out: create a scale set, deploy a simple web app to Azure App Service, and run a container using one of Azure's container options. Leave one small VM and one web app running (within your budget) — weeks 5 and 6 will reuse them.

Milestone — mid-plan readiness check. At the end of week 4, sit a first untimed practice test covering all domains, including the ones you have not studied yet. The purpose is diagnostic, not motivational: it baselines your strong and weak domains and tells you where weeks 7–8 revision must concentrate. How to score, interpret and log that attempt is exactly what the practice test strategy guide covers.