Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate

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Exam at a Glance

AZ-104 measures whether you can do the day-to-day work of an Azure administrator: managing identities and governance, provisioning and securing storage, deploying compute and virtual networks, and monitoring and protecting the resources you run.

 

What the Exam Covers

The exam has five domains, and the weights are not equal: identities and governance plus compute are the two highest-weight domains, storage and networking follow, and monitoring is the smallest at 10 to 15 percent.

 

Manage Azure identities and governance — 20-25%

Microsoft Entra users, groups, licenses, external users, and self-service password reset; built-in Azure roles, role assignments at different scopes, and interpreting access; Azure Policy, resource locks, tags, resource groups, subscriptions, and management groups; cost alerts, budgets, and Azure Advisor.

 

Implement and manage storage — 15-20%

Storage firewalls, shared access signature tokens, stored access policies, access keys, and identity-based access for Azure Files; storage accounts, redundancy, object replication, and encryption; Storage Explorer and AzCopy; file shares and blob containers, storage tiers, soft delete, snapshots, lifecycle management, and blob versioning.

 

Deploy and manage Azure compute resources — 20-25%

Interpreting, modifying, deploying, and exporting ARM templates and Bicep files; virtual machines, encryption at host, moves across resource groups, subscriptions, or regions, sizes and disks, availability zones and sets, and scale sets; Container Registry, Container Instances, and Container Apps; App Service plans, scaling, certificates and TLS, custom DNS, backup, networking, and deployment slots.

 

Implement and manage virtual networking — 15-20%

Virtual networks, subnets, peering, public IP addresses, user-defined routes, and connectivity troubleshooting; network security groups and application security groups, effective security rules, Azure Bastion, service endpoints and private endpoints; Azure DNS, internal and public load balancers, and troubleshooting load balancing.

 

Monitor and maintain Azure resources — 10-15%

Azure Monitor metrics, log settings and queries, alert rules, action groups, and alert processing rules; Insights for VMs, storage, and networks; Network Watcher and Connection monitor; Recovery Services vaults and Backup vaults, backup policies, backup and restore, Site Recovery failover to a secondary region, and backup reports and alerts.

 

The full bullet-level list lives in the official study guide. Treat it as your checklist:

The Official AZ-104 Study Guide

 

How This Maps to CertiAce Practice Modules

The CertiAce question bank is organized by the same six learning paths Microsoft uses for the AZ-104 course: five map one-to-one to the exam domains, and the prerequisites path covers the tooling the others assume. Use the mapping below and the topics behind your missed questions to identify the skills-measured areas to revisit:

 

Where AZ-104 Fits

AZ-104 has no official prerequisites: no certification is required before earning Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate. If you are new to Azure, starting with AZ-900 is strongly recommended: it builds the portal familiarity and governance vocabulary AZ-104 assumes. The certification is also a gateway: to become a Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (exam AZ-305) you must first earn Azure Administrator Associate, and it is one of the certifications that satisfies the prerequisite for Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert (exam AZ-400).

Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate

 

Before You Start

This is not a beginner exam: Microsoft expects hands-on Azure administration experience and the questions assume the fundamentals below. Check yourself against this table. Anything unfamiliar is where your preparation should start:

 

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Step-by-Step Study Plan

How long you need depends on where you start. Treat these estimates as planning guidance and adjust them to your starting knowledge and weekly study hours:

 

Step 1: Read the Official Study Guide

Skim the full skills-measured list once, and mark every bullet you could not explain to a colleague. That marked-up list is your personal syllabus: everything else in this plan exists to clear it. The current list is the April 17, 2026 version; its change log records only minor changes, so older material is still broadly aligned.

The Official Study Guide

 

Step 2: Schedule Your Exam

Choose a realistic target date after reviewing the skills list and your available study time. A date on the calendar turns studying into a countdown, so pick one using the prep-time table above and plan backwards from it.

Certification and Exam Details Page

 

Step 3: Work Through the Official Learning Path

Complete the AZ-104 course modules on Microsoft Learn. The course is six learning paths: start with the prerequisites path if you need a refresher on the portal, Cloud Shell, PowerShell, and ARM templates, then work through the five main paths in order. Take notes on concepts you cannot explain in simple terms, and flag anything that needs hands-on practice. You will come back to those in Step 5.

Official Learning Path Course Page

 

Step 4: Watch the Study Cram

John Savill's AZ-104 Study Cram v2 compresses the whole syllabus into one focused four-hour session with whiteboard explanations, ideal as a second pass after the learning path, and again as a final refresher in your last days. Make sure you use the v2: the original cram is marked retired on YouTube.

John Savill's AZ-104 Study Cram v2

 

Step 5: Get Hands-On Practice

AZ-104 is a hands-on administrator exam: many questions describe a practical scenario where you must pick the correct tool, setting, or sequence of steps. Create a free Azure account and work through the official lab exercises for the AZ-104 course; they are free, self-paced, and cover every domain. Delete resource groups when you finish a session to avoid charges. Make sure you personally touch:

• Creating Entra users and groups and assigning Azure roles at different scopes
• Applying Azure Policy assignments, resource locks, and tags
• Storage accounts with redundancy, SAS tokens, storage tiers, and lifecycle management
• Deploying resources with an ARM template or Bicep file, and VMs into availability zones and a scale set
• Peering virtual networks, testing NSG rules, and configuring a load balancer and Azure Bastion
• Azure Monitor alerts, and backing up and restoring a VM with Azure Backup

Repeat the key tasks in PowerShell and the Azure CLI, not only the portal: the exam quotes commands.

Official AZ-104 Lab Exercises

 

Step 6: Benchmark Your Knowledge

Use CertiAce to benchmark your readiness module by module. The practice modules map to the exam domains as shown above, so use the module mapping and the topics behind your missed questions to identify the skills-measured areas to revisit. Microsoft also offers a free official practice assessment on the certification page. Aim for consistent performance across every module, not one lucky high score; if a topic is unstable, go back to learning plus hands-on practice. Watch for questions that separate similar services: service versus private endpoints, availability sets versus zones, Recovery Services versus Backup vaults.

CertiAce AZ-104 Exam Practice

Official AZ-104 Practice Assessment

 

Step 7: Take the Exam

The day before, review only your weak topics and the defaults you find hard to remember, such as storage redundancy options and NSG rule evaluation. No brand-new material. On exam day, read each question for what it is truly asking, eliminate wrong options first, and watch for wording that implies constraints such as least privilege, minimal cost, or minimal administrative effort.

Worth knowing before you sit down:

• Microsoft Learn is available during the exam in a split screen. Use it to check details you genuinely need: the timer keeps running, and the exam is deliberately too long to look up every answer. Browsing is limited to Microsoft Learn itself (no Q&A, practice assessments, or profile), and personal notes and other websites are unavailable.
• You can take unscheduled breaks, but the clock keeps running and you cannot return to questions you already saw.
• Case studies lock when you leave them: finish each one before moving on, because you cannot revisit its questions afterwards.
• Try the exam sandbox beforehand so the question formats and interface hold no surprises: Exam Sandbox

 

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Additional Learning Resources