The AZ-104 (Microsoft Azure Administrator) is not an exam you can pass by only reading documentation. Most questions are scenario-based: a short business situation, a constraint, and four plausible-looking ways to solve it in Azure. That means your study plan needs two things in equal measure — concept study and hands-on practice under time pressure.
Here is the 4-week plan I recommend to anyone who already has basic Azure familiarity (if you are completely new to cloud, spend one extra week on Azure fundamentals first).
Start with the exam domains, not with a course
Microsoft publishes the skills measured for AZ-104, and the weights tell you where to spend your time:
| Domain | Weight |
|---|---|
| Manage Azure identities and governance | 20–25% |
| Implement and manage storage | 15–20% |
| Deploy and manage Azure compute resources | 20–25% |
| Implement and manage virtual networking | 15–20% |
| Monitor and maintain Azure resources | 10–15% |
Two domains — identities/governance and compute — together can be almost half the exam. Plan your weeks around these weights instead of studying topics in random order.
Week 1: Identities, governance, and the portal basics
- Microsoft Entra ID: users, groups, licenses, external (guest) users, self-service password reset
- RBAC: built-in roles, scope inheritance, deny assignments — know the difference between Owner, Contributor, and User Access Administrator cold
- Subscriptions and management groups, Azure Policy, resource locks, tags, and cost management basics
- Get comfortable in Cloud Shell with both Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI; administrators are expected to move between the portal and the command line
Lab work: create users and groups, assign RBAC roles at different scopes and test what each role can and cannot do, apply an Azure Policy that denies a resource type, and add a resource lock.
Week 2: Storage and compute
- Storage accounts: redundancy options (LRS, ZRS, GRS, GZRS), access tiers, lifecycle management, soft delete and versioning for Blob Storage
- Securing storage: shared access signatures, stored access policies, storage firewalls and virtual networks, identity-based access for Azure Files
- Tools: AzCopy and Azure Storage Explorer
- Virtual machines: sizing, disks, availability sets and zones, scale sets, disk encryption, moving a VM between resource groups/subscriptions
- ARM templates and Bicep: reading, modifying, and exporting templates matters more than writing from scratch
- App Service and containers: plans, scaling, deployment slots, custom DNS and TLS, Azure Container Instances and Container Registry
Lab work: create a storage account with geo-redundancy, configure a lifecycle rule, generate a SAS token with an expiry, deploy a VM from a template, and scale an App Service plan up and out.
Week 3: Networking, monitoring, and backup
- Virtual networks: subnets, peering, public IPs, user-defined routes, DNS zones and records
- Security: network security groups and application security groups, service endpoints vs. private endpoints, Azure Bastion
- Load balancing: internal vs. public load balancers and when each is used, plus basic load-balancer troubleshooting
- Monitoring: Azure Monitor metrics and logs, alerts and action groups, VM and container insights
- Network Watcher and Connection Monitor for connectivity problems
- Backup and recovery: Recovery Services vaults, backup policies, restoring a VM, and the basics of Azure Site Recovery
Lab work: peer two VNets, block traffic with an NSG rule and verify it with Network Watcher, configure an alert on VM CPU, and back up a VM then restore it to a new resource group.
Week 4: Practice tests — used properly
This is the week most candidates skip or do badly. A practice test is a diagnostic tool, not a way to memorize answers.
- Take the first full test in timed, exam-like conditions. No pausing, no searching.
- Review every wrong answer — and every right answer you guessed — and map each one back to a domain.
- Spend two days restudying only your two weakest domains, with labs.
- Take a second, different test. Repeat the review cycle.
A reasonable readiness signal: scoring around 80% or higher on two different timed practice tests, with no single domain collapsing. If you want a structured question bank organized by these same domains, a timed AZ-104 practice test (full-length tests plus shorter topic-wise sessions) is a practical way to run this routine — whichever provider you use, the review-the-mistakes step is the part that actually raises your score.
Mistakes that cost people the exam
- Reading without doing. AZ-104 rewards people who have actually clicked through the portal. Every concept in weeks 1–3 has a lab attached for a reason.
- Ignoring RBAC and Policy. Governance feels dry, so candidates under-study it — and it is worth up to a quarter of the exam.
- Memorizing practice answers. If the same question appears with the names changed and you get it wrong, you learned the answer, not the concept.
- No time practice. The real exam is roughly a minute to ninety seconds per question. If you have never worked against a clock, exam day will feel faster than you expect.
Final word
Four weeks is enough if the weeks are structured: domains first, labs with every topic, and practice tests treated as diagnostics. Book the exam at the start of week 4 — having a date on the calendar is the simplest motivation trick there is.
Good luck, and if you have a study routine that worked for you, share it in the comments.
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