Is AZ-104 hard? Exam difficulty explained
AZ-104 is a moderately hard associate exam: clearly harder than a fundamentals exam, easier than the expert-level AZ-305, and much harder for people who have read about Azure without using it. The difficulty does not come from any one service being deep. It comes from breadth — five domains and dozens of services in 100 minutes — from networking scenarios that combine several settings, and from commands and templates you have to read quickly.
What makes it hard
It is wide
The outline spans Entra ID, RBAC, Azure Policy, storage accounts, Blob Storage, Azure Files, ARM and Bicep, virtual machines, scale sets, three container services, App Service, virtual networks, NSGs, Bastion, private endpoints, DNS, load balancers, Azure Monitor, Network Watcher, Azure Backup and Site Recovery. Few administrators touch all of that at work. Most candidates find two or three areas they have never used, and those are where the marks go.
Networking questions stack settings
A networking question rarely asks about one thing. It describes two peered networks, an NSG on a subnet, another on a NIC, a route table and a load balancer, and asks why one VM cannot reach another. You need to evaluate each layer in order. Candidates who know every feature individually still lose marks here, because they have never traced a packet through all of them together.
You read commands and templates
The audience profile names PowerShell, the Azure CLI, ARM templates and Bicep. Questions show a snippet with a gap, or a template with a parameter, and ask what it does or what to change. That is slower than choosing a service from a list, and it punishes anyone who only used the portal.
The options all sound right
Many questions offer four options that are each valid somewhere. Contributor or Owner, availability set or zones, service endpoint or private endpoint, Recovery Services vault or Backup vault. The requirement usually contains one word that decides it: least privilege, datacenter, on-premises, disks. Missing that word is the most common way to get an answer wrong while knowing the material.
Small details are tested
Some questions depend on facts that are easy to overlook: five reserved addresses per subnet, the Bastion subnet name, the tier needed for deployment slots, the prerequisites for object replication, or that a ReadOnly lock blocks listing storage keys. None is hard on its own, but together they reward people who have built things and noticed the errors.
What makes it easier
- The free official practice assessment. Microsoft offers one for AZ-104, which many newer exams lack.
- A stable outline. The April 2026 update made only minor changes, so good recent material is plentiful.
- Predictable domains. Monitoring and backup is small and formulaic; identity questions mostly reduce to “which role, at which scope”.
- Everything is labbable. Every objective can be tried in a pay-as-you-go subscription for a small amount of money.
How hard for whom
| Your background | Expected difficulty | Realistic preparation |
|---|---|---|
| Azure administrator for a year or more | Moderate | 3–4 weeks, mostly on unused areas |
| Windows Server or VMware administrator | Moderate | 4–6 weeks; concepts transfer, Azure names do not |
| Administrator on another cloud | Moderate | 4–5 weeks; learn Azure’s identity and networking model |
| Developer with some Azure use | Moderate to hard | 5–6 weeks; networking and backup are usually new |
| No infrastructure experience | Hard | 8 weeks or more, starting with fundamentals |
Common reasons people fail
- Skipping networking because it is only 15–20%. It produces the hardest questions on the exam.
- Portal-only practice. Commands and templates appear in questions, and reading them is a skill.
- Confusing Entra roles with Azure roles. It turns easy identity questions into guesses.
- Studying old material. Service names and features have changed, and older courses miss Bicep, Container Apps and the Backup vault.
- Running out of time on the case study. Keep a reserve for it rather than lingering on single questions.
How to make it easier
Build a small environment end to end during your preparation: a governed subscription, a storage account with SAS and lifecycle rules, a VM and a web app deployed from Bicep, a hub-and-spoke network with Bastion and a private endpoint, and monitoring with alerts and backups. The study plan breaks that into four weeks. Once you have debugged your own NSGs and routes, the networking scenarios read like problems you have already solved.
Before booking, take the free 20-question practice test and the official practice assessment. If you score below 14 here, the domain guides in this section will show you where to spend your remaining time.