Azure Administrator AZ-104 Guide: What to Study First
AZ-104 is not a vocabulary test like AZ-900. It expects you to administer identities, networking, storage, compute, monitoring, and governance in a working Azure environment. The fastest path is hands-on practice plus domain-weighted review.
The AZ-104 domains that matter most
Identity, governance, storage, compute, networking, and monitoring all appear heavily. Networking and identity are the highest-risk domains because one wrong assumption often breaks the whole scenario.
Labs you should complete
Do not rely on videos alone. Build the common admin workflows at least once.
- Create users, groups, RBAC assignments, and conditional access policies.
- Deploy a virtual network with subnets, NSGs, route tables, and peering.
- Configure storage accounts, lifecycle policies, and access tiers.
- Deploy VMs, scale sets, Azure Monitor alerts, and backup policies.
How AZ-104 differs from AZ-900
AZ-900 asks whether you recognize a service. AZ-104 asks whether you know how to operate it. Expect more scenario questions, more portal and CLI details, and more tradeoffs around governance and access control.
Readiness checklist
You are ready when you can explain network security groups vs route tables, role assignments vs policy assignments, Azure Monitor vs Log Analytics, and availability sets vs availability zones without notes.