How to pass AZ-104: a 4 to 6 week study plan

AZ-104 is aimed at administrators with experience in systems, networking and virtualization. If you have never created a virtual network, assigned a role or diagnosed a virtual machine, spend a few days first working in the Azure portal, then repeat the same tasks with Azure CLI or PowerShell.

You do not need to know every Azure service. The five areas of the official AZ-104 outline are identity and governance (20–25%), storage (15–20%), compute (20–25%), virtual networking (15–20%) and monitoring and maintenance (10–15%).

Start with Microsoft Entra ID, subscriptions, management groups, RBAC and Azure Policy. Continue with storage accounts and redundancy; then virtual machines, App Service, containers, load balancers, DNS and connectivity; and finish with Azure Monitor, alerts, backup and recovery.

The advantage of this order is that identity, permissions and networking appear inside almost every scenario. Understanding them early stops you studying each service as an island and lets you spot the real clue in each question: nearly always a constraint on cost, availability or least privilege.

Create a resource group with a VNet and two subnets, deploy a VM, limit traffic with an NSG, add a storage account and configure an alert. Grant a user access with the least privilege possible and delete everything when you finish to avoid costs.

Repeat the lab once from the portal and once from the command line. Note what you would choose if the question demanded high availability, lowest cost or least administrative effort: those three variants are the most common pattern in scenario questions.

With daily Azure experience, four to six weeks: two for identity, governance, storage and networking; one for compute; and one for monitoring, backup and review. If you do not administer Azure daily, add two weeks of lab work before the mock exams.

Take a diagnostic mock exam at the start and another at the end of each block. Ten tests in a row on the last day do not replace spaced practice; what raises your score is fixing each mistake the day it appears.

On the AZ-104 page you can practise by category following the five official domains, with an explanation on every question and a review queue of your mistakes. You start free, with no sign-up; the AZ-104 cheat sheet summarizes the limits and decisions asked about most.

Book the exam when you keep consistent results in mock exams with questions you have not seen and can justify why you rule out each alternative. Always check Microsoft's official guide before your date: the outline can change.