Understanding the AZ-104 Exam Structure
The AZ-104 is Microsoft's Azure Administrator certification exam, and it's one of the more common certs people go for. I've sat through the prep process and watched a lot of folks struggle with the same questions, so here's what I can tell you based on actual experience. The official count sits somewhere between 40 and 60 questions, though Microsoft doesn't pin down an exact number. The exam clock runs for 120 minutes, which gives you roughly two minutes per question on average. That might sound generous until you hit the case studies, which are the real time sink. Case studies appear two or three times throughout the exam. Each one has a scenario at the top followed by four to six questions. You don't get a separate timer for them, so time management matters. I once did a practice test where the case studies ate up almost half my available minutes, and I had to skip and flag two questions near the end because I was running out of clock. That experience taught me to pace myself from question one instead of getting comfortable and then panicking.
Question Types You'll Actually See
Most of the exam is multiple choice, but not all of it. You'll encounter drag-and-drop questions where you order steps for deploying a virtual machine or matching a service to its description. Then there are hot-area questions where you click on a part of a diagram to fill in a blank. The performance-based items are scattered throughout, not clustered at the end like some other certs do. One thing people get wrong is treating every question the same weight. They aren't. Case study questions carry more points than a standalone multiple choice item. If you blow through the easy ones fast and then realize you haven't budgeted enough time for the heavy questions, the score takes a hit. I learned this the hard way during my first attempt. I finished the first half quickly, felt good, then got stuck on a long case study about configuring Azure Monitor with alert rules. I ran out of time on the last section entirely. My score was close but not enough to pass on that first try.
What the Exam Actually Covers
The skills measure breakdown is what Microsoft publishes, and it's worth looking at before you buy a course. About 20 to 25 percent of the exam focuses on managing Azure identities and governance. That means Entra ID, role-based access control, assigning roles, and setting up management groups. I found this section straightforward if you actually work with it, but tricky if you've only read about it. The difference between a role and a permission set showed up in a question that caught me off guard. Another 20 to 25 percent covers storage solutions. Blob storage, lifecycle management, storage account tiers, and connectivity options like private endpoints. The questions here love to make you choose between similar-sounding options. For example, they'll ask when to use a premium SSD disk versus a standard SSD, and both answers sound plausible if you don't know the latency requirements of the workload. Compute makes up 20 to 25 percent. Virtual machines, container instances, Kubernetes Service, and autoscaling. This is the section where hands-on practice really pays off. I spent most of my lab time building and breaking AKS clusters because the exam will throw you a question about node pool upgrades or maintaining availability sets, and you need to know what happens when you change a setting.
Get the Full Details
Networking accounts for 20 to 25 percent as well. VNet peering, network security groups, application gateways, and Azure DNS. This area has the most overlap between services, which is where the trickier questions come from. A common pitfall is confusing how NAT gateway works versus a load balancer outbound rule. I saw a practice question that asked which configuration would give a VM a static outbound IP, and the answer depended on knowing that NAT gateway provides that while basic load balancer outbound rules do not assign a persistent IP. The remaining 5 to 10 percent covers monitoring, backup, and business continuity. Recovery Services vaults, site recovery, and log analytics workspaces. These topics are smaller but still show up with disproportionate difficulty. Don't skip them because of the low percentage.
Where People Lose Points
One pattern I noticed across hundreds of forum posts and practice tests is that candidates who rely only on memorization fail the scenario-based questions. The exam doesn't ask you to define what a storage account is. It asks you to pick the right configuration for a specific workload with specific constraints. If the question says you need geo-redundant storage with immutability for compliance, the answer is a specific combination of redundancy type and blob container settings, not just "use storage." Another trap is assuming all questions are independent. With case studies, the scenario text contains information you need for multiple questions in that block. Skipping ahead and missing a detail in the scenario can cost you several questions at once. I started reading the entire case study first, writing down the key constraints on scrap paper, and then answering each question against that list. It added about three minutes to my total time but saved me from second-guessing answers.
Practical Prep Advice
Hands-on labs matter more than video courses for this exam. I spent about six weeks prep time, with roughly half of that dedicated to actual lab work on Azure free accounts or through Microsoft Learn sandboxes. The exercises on Microsoft Learn are free and aligned closely with the exam objectives. Doing those labs yourself, not just clicking through, made a noticeable difference. Practice exams help, but the ones you choose matter. Some third-party providers write questions that are too simplistic and don't match the tone of the real exam. I found the official Microsoft practice assessment and a couple of measures from fairly reputable providers to be closer to the actual difficulty. The gaps between practice scores and the real thing can be five to ten percent, so treat a 75 percent on practice as a solid but not guaranteed passing signal. If you're short on time, focus your effort on the four main skill areas that each make up 20 to 25 percent of the exam. Storage networking, compute, and identity governance are the big four. The monitoring and backup piece is smaller but still shows up enough that ignoring it entirely is a mistake.
The Downsides Nobody Talks About
The exam doesn't test everything you need for the job. It tests what Microsoft thinks an administrator should know, which means some day-to-day tasks get less attention than they deserve. For instance, troubleshooting a broken network flow between subnets using NSG rules came up in my exam, but configuring CI/CD pipelines for container deployments barely registered despite being something I did weekly. That's just the nature of a vendor cert. It validates a baseline, not comprehensive competence. Also, the exam retake policy changed recently. You have to wait 24 hours before your first retake, then 14 days after a second failure. If you're close to passing and want to reschedule immediately, that's not how it works anymore. Plan your attempts accordingly instead of assuming you can bounce back the next morning. The bottom line is that the question count is flexible enough that you can't game it, but the time limit is real. Two hours for 40 to 60 questions including case studies means you need to move with purpose. Know your stuff, practice under timed conditions, and don't fall into the trap of treating every question type the same.
