How to Prepare for the Azure Administrator Certification

A five-phase AZ-104 study plan — objective mapping, Microsoft Learn, hands-on labs, practice tests and final-week tactics — built around how the exam actually tests.

Daniel Carter5 August 2026 · 11 min read

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Flat-lay illustration of five AZ-104 study stages from objectives map to booked exam date

Preparing well for the Azure Administrator Associate certification comes down to one principle: study the way the exam tests. AZ-104 is a hands-on, operational exam — it assumes you can work the Azure portal, read PowerShell and Azure CLI, and reason about real resources — so a preparation plan built on watching videos will not survive contact with it. The plan below is organised into five phases that move you from the official objectives to a booked exam, with hands-on lab work as the spine rather than an afterthought.

This article is a preparation method, nothing else. If you are still weighing how tough the exam is, start with How Hard Is the Azure Administrator Exam?; if you want the full credential overview — objectives, cost, booking and renewal in one place — that lives in our Azure Administrator certification guide.

Know what you are preparing for

A quick factual anchor before the plan, because every phase is shaped by it. AZ-104 is Microsoft's associate-level Azure Administrator exam: 100 minutes, proctored through Pearson VUE (online or at a test centre), scored on a 1–1,000 scale with 700 needed to pass, and possibly including interactive question components. Microsoft does not publish a question count, so ignore any resource that plans around one. There are no formal prerequisites — you can sit AZ-104 without ever taking Azure Fundamentals — though Microsoft recommends experience with the Azure portal, PowerShell, the Azure CLI, ARM templates and Bicep, and Microsoft Entra ID. The exam fee varies by country or region, so confirm your local price on Microsoft's official certification page when you book.

The exam covers five domains, and your entire plan hangs off them:

Manage Azure identities and governance
Implement and manage storage
Deploy and manage Azure compute resources
Implement and manage virtual networking
Monitor and maintain Azure resources

If your background is thin enough that those five headings feel abstract, it may be worth deciding deliberately whether to warm up with AZ-900 first — a one-sentence question here, answered properly in Azure Fundamentals vs Azure Administrator.

Phase 1: Map the objectives and take a baseline

Time: a few days. Output: a gap list.

Start with the official AZ-104 study guide (aka.ms/AZ104-StudyGuide). It is the only authoritative statement of what the exam measures, including the current domain weightings — Microsoft refreshed the exam content in April 2026, which is precisely why older course outlines and blog syllabi drift out of date. Work through the skills outline line by line and mark every item honestly: can do from memory, have done once, never touched.

Two refinements make this baseline much more useful:

Weight your gaps by domain. A cluster of "never touched" marks inside one domain matters more than the same number scattered thinly, because the exam's scaled scoring means a hollow domain can sink an otherwise passing performance.
Test the tooling dimension separately. For each skill, ask not just "do I know this?" but "could I do it in the portal, and recognise it in CLI or PowerShell form?" Many candidates' real gap is not the concept but the second representation of it.

While you are in Microsoft's official material, open the Exam Sandbox and click through the question formats. Doing this in week one, rather than exam week, means the interactive item types never cost you composure later.

Phase 2: Structured learning against the gap list

Time: the bulk of your first half of preparation. Output: every "never touched" item promoted to "have done once".

Microsoft Learn's free, official AZ-104 learning paths map directly onto the exam domains and should be your default backbone — they are maintained in step with the exam, which third-party courses cannot guarantee. If you learn better from video, a course can sit alongside, but check its recency against the April 2026 content update before trusting it: drilling a retired detail is worse than not drilling at all.

Order matters less than most study plans pretend, but this sequence tends to compound well because later domains lean on earlier ones:

Identities and governance first. Microsoft Entra ID, role-based access control and governance scopes underpin everything else you will build; misunderstand scope inheritance here and both storage and networking topics get harder than they need to be.
Storage and compute next, in either order. These are the "build things" domains, and they generate the resources your networking and monitoring practice will need.
Virtual networking after that, with the most calendar time reserved. Networking is consistently the domain candidates rank hardest, because questions stack concepts — addressing, peering, security rules, routing, name resolution — into single scenarios.
Monitoring and maintenance last, woven through the others: every lab you build in Phase 3 is something you can practise monitoring, backing up and recovering.

One discipline throughout: end every study session by writing two or three scenario questions of your own ("A VM in subnet A cannot reach a storage account — list what I'd check, in order"). Composing questions forces retrieval and application, which is the cognitive level the exam operates at; re-reading notes does not.

Phase 3: Hands-on labs — the phase that decides the result

Time: continuous from week one, dominant in the middle of your plan. Output: operational fluency, not familiarity.

This is the phase that separates passes from near-misses. AZ-104 is written for people who have operated Azure, and there is no reading-based substitute for having done so. You will need somewhere to practise: a work subscription (with a clearly agreed sandbox area), or a personal subscription — check Microsoft's site for its current free-account and trial offers, set a spending alert on day one, and make deleting resource groups after every lab a reflex so practice never turns into a bill.

Build labs that mirror the exam's operational framing rather than isolated feature demos:

Identity and governance: create users and groups; assign built-in roles at different scopes and verify what each identity can actually see and do; apply a policy and a resource lock, then attempt the actions they should block.
Storage: deploy storage accounts with different redundancy and access-tier choices; secure access and rotate the credentials you used; move data between tiers and note what changes.
Compute: deploy virtual machines through the portal, then redeploy the same design from an ARM or Bicep template; resize, snapshot and recover a VM; deploy one containerised workload and one App Service app so neither question style is foreign.
Networking — double your reps here: build two virtual networks and peer them; write network security group rules and prove which traffic they pass and block; set up name resolution and a load-balancing scenario; then break your own configuration and diagnose it. Troubleshooting your own broken lab is the closest cheap approximation to the exam's scenario questions.
Monitoring: put alerts and diagnostics on everything above; configure a backup and actually perform a restore — the restore is the part people skip and the part that fixes the knowledge.

Do each significant lab twice: once via the portal for the visual model, once via CLI or PowerShell so the command layer stops being decorative knowledge. You do not need to write scripts from a blank page in the exam, but you must read them fluently.

A calibration note on hours. Microsoft publishes no official study duration for AZ-104, and any fixed figure would mislead someone. The honest framing: an administrator already working in Azure daily needs a focused revision cycle; a sysadmin from on-premises needs substantially more lab time, concentrated in networking and identity; a study-only candidate should let the lab phase run as long as it takes for portal work to feel routine, because that is the actual variable the exam measures.

Phase 4: Practice tests as instruments, not rehearsal theatre

Time: the second half of preparation. Output: a score trend and a shrinking weak-domain list.

Once every domain has moved past first contact, switch from input to measurement. Microsoft offers free official practice assessments on Microsoft Learn — use them as your first calibration against the real objectives. From there, the discipline of practice testing matters more than the volume:

Simulate honestly. Full-length, timed, no notes, no pausing. The 100-minute limit is only comfortable if pacing is rehearsed, and an untimed practice run measures nothing about exam readiness.
Analyse before you re-attempt. The value of a practice test is the half-day after it: sort every miss by domain, then classify each one — knowledge gap, misread question, or tooling blind spot — because each classification sends you to a different fix (Phase 2 review, slower reading, or another lab rep respectively).
Target weak domains between runs. Re-testing without remediation just re-measures the same gaps. Alternate: test, fix the weakest domain, test again.
Never memorise answers. If you see a repeated question and recognise the answer's letter rather than its reasoning, the practice set has stopped measuring you. Change something — question order, question pool — and treat explanations, not answers, as the study object. Memorisation also fails on contact with a live exam that Microsoft updates continuously.

ExamPractice's AZ-104 practice questions include free samples so you can gauge the style cheaply, with fuller question sets and a timed practice-test simulation available to subscribers — a sensible slot for it is here in Phase 4, as the benchmarking layer between your lab work and a booking decision.

The booking trigger: when consecutive timed, full-length runs land comfortably above the pass threshold with no domain consistently dragging, book the exam. A date on the calendar converts drift into a deadline, and Microsoft's retake policy (first retake available after 24 hours, longer waits for later attempts) means an unlucky day is a setback, not a catastrophe.

Phase 5: The final week and exam day

Time: seven days. Output: nothing new — consolidation and logistics.

The last week is for sharpening, not expanding:

Re-read the study guide's skills outline one final time, ticking items off aloud. Anything that still triggers hesitation gets one targeted lab or review session — no new topics beyond that.
Run one final timed simulation early in the week, then stop full-length testing. Late-week mock failures cost confidence and teach little.
Rehearse pacing rules: decide in advance how long you will sit with a hard scenario before flagging it and moving on. On a 100-minute exam with an unpublished question count, guarding time is a scoring strategy.
Settle logistics. Choose online proctoring or a test centre through Pearson VUE deliberately: online saves travel but adds system checks and a strict workspace protocol; a centre trades convenience for a controlled environment. If online, run the equipment check days ahead, not hours.
Know the scoring so the interface can't rattle you. You need 700 on a 1,000-point scaled scale — that is not 70% of questions, so do not attempt live arithmetic about how many misses you can afford. Answer, flag, move.

One administrative note worth knowing before you book rather than after: the Azure Administrator Associate certification has a 12-month renewal cycle, maintained through a free, unproctored, open-book online assessment on Microsoft Learn, available in the six months before expiry with unlimited attempts. The proctored exam you are preparing for is a one-time gate — renewal is far lighter.

Five preparation mistakes that cost AZ-104 attempts

Course-completion as a proxy for readiness. Finishing a video course measures persistence, not operational skill. If your portal hours are a fraction of your video hours, the ratio is inverted.
Portal-only preparation. Every skill you can only perform by clicking is half-learned for this exam. The CLI/PowerShell reading pass in Phase 3 is not optional polish.
Letting networking slide because it is uncomfortable. The hardest domain attracts the least practice time precisely because practising it feels bad. Schedule networking labs first in a session, not last.
Practice-test bingeing without analysis. Ten unanalysed mocks teach less than three analysed ones. The miss-classification step in Phase 4 is where scores actually move.
Preparing from pre-2026 materials unchecked. The April 2026 content refresh means any resource must be validated against the current study guide before it earns study hours.

Your pre-booking readiness checklist

Book the exam when you can tick every line honestly:

[ ] I have worked through the current official study guide and nothing on the skills outline is a "never touched".
[ ] I have built, broken and repaired resources in all five domains in a live subscription — including a network I diagnosed and a backup I restored.
[ ] I can read CLI, PowerShell and template snippets for common tasks without translation anxiety.
[ ] My last two full-length, honestly timed practice runs scored comfortably above the pass line, with no domain consistently weakest.
[ ] I finish full-length runs inside 100 minutes with time to review flagged items.
[ ] I have chosen my delivery mode, verified equipment or travel plans, and confirmed the current exam fee for my country on Microsoft's page.

Booking with confidence

A strong AZ-104 preparation is not mysterious: map the official objectives, learn against your actual gaps, spend most of your effort operating real resources, measure with timed practice until the trend is unambiguous, then book while the momentum is warm. The exam rewards exactly what this plan builds — operational fluency across all five domains — which is also why the credential carries weight with employers. Whether that weight justifies the effort for your particular career is a separate question, answered in Is the Azure Administrator Certification Worth It? And if AZ-104 is a stepping stone in a longer plan, it is also the mandatory prerequisite for the Azure Solutions Architect Expert credential — useful to know before you decide how deep to let this preparation cycle go.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to prepare for AZ-104?

Microsoft publishes no official figure, and honest answers are profile-shaped rather than numeric: current Azure administrators need a focused revision cycle; on-premises sysadmins need meaningfully longer with extra networking lab time; study-only candidates should extend the hands-on phase until portal work feels routine. Use the readiness checklist above, not a calendar, as the booking trigger.

Do I need AZ-900 before starting AZ-104 preparation?

No — AZ-104 has no prerequisites. AZ-900 suits candidates who need the conceptual ground floor first, but experienced IT professionals often go straight to AZ-104 preparation.

Are Microsoft's own practice assessments enough on their own?

They are the right starting benchmark because they are free and official. Most candidates benefit from adding further timed, full-length simulation and per-domain analysis on top, since volume and variety are what expose pattern-level weaknesses.

What happens if I fail the exam?

You can retake after a 24-hour wait for a first retake, with longer waiting periods for subsequent attempts. Your score report's domain breakdown tells you where to concentrate — treat a failed attempt as an expensive but precise practice test.

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.