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AZ-104 study resources

Updated September 28, 2026

The best AZ-104 resources are free: Microsoft’s skills outline, the official practice assessment, the Azure documentation for each service in the outline, and an Azure subscription you build things in. Add realistic practice questions to find your weak domain. The one thing to be careful with is outdated material, because AZ-104 has been revised several times and older courses teach settings and service names that have since changed.

Start with the official material

The skills outline. Five domains, from 10–15% to 20–25%, with identity and compute the largest. It names every service and task the exam covers. Read it before anything else, and keep it open while you study. The current version is dated April 17, 2026.

The practice assessment. Microsoft offers a free official practice assessment for AZ-104 on Microsoft Learn. Take it once at the start to see where you stand and again near the end. It is the closest thing to the real exam’s tone and difficulty.

Microsoft Learn training. The official study guide points to self-paced learning paths and instructor-led training for the exam. Use them for structure, but treat them as a starting point: the modules explain concepts, and the exam asks you to apply them to a scenario.

The Azure documentation. For each service in the outline — Microsoft Entra ID, Azure Policy, Azure Storage, Blob Storage, Azure Files, ARM templates and Bicep, Virtual Machines, Container Instances, Container Apps, App Service, Virtual Network, Azure DNS, Load Balancer, Bastion, Azure Monitor, Network Watcher, Azure Backup and Site Recovery — the quickstarts and how-to guides are the best study material there is. The exam is written against the behaviour they describe.

Exam prep videos and the sandbox. Microsoft’s Exam Readiness Zone has AZ-104 prep videos. The exam sandbox shows the interface and question types in ten minutes.

Lab work is the differentiator

AZ-104 describes a configuration and asks what is wrong, missing or allowed. Six labs cover most of it:

  1. Govern a subscription. A management group, a Deny policy for a missing tag with a remediation task, a CanNotDelete lock, a guest user with Reader on one resource group, and a budget alert.
  2. Protect a storage account. A SAS from a stored access policy that you revoke, a firewall restricted to one subnet, a lifecycle rule, soft delete and versioning, then restore an overwritten and a deleted blob.
  3. Deploy from code. A Bicep file for a VM in an availability zone; change a parameter and redeploy; export and decompile a resource group.
  4. Run the same app three ways. Container Instances, Container Apps and App Service with a staging slot you swap.
  5. Break the network. A hub with two spokes, NSGs on subnet and NIC, a route table through a dummy appliance, Bastion, a private endpoint, and an internal load balancer whose probe you block. Diagnose each with Network Watcher.
  6. Monitor and recover. A diagnostic setting, a KQL query, a metric alert with an action group and an alert processing rule, a VM backup with a file restore, and a Site Recovery test failover.

Deallocate VMs and delete resource groups after each session. Bastion, Site Recovery replicas and running VMs cost money while idle.

Worth paying for

Practice tests written against the current outline. Their value is diagnosis: they show which domain is weakest while there is still time to fix it. The free 20-question test here is weighted like the real exam and is a good first check.

A small Azure budget. Twenty or thirty dollars of lab time, spent deliberately, teaches more than any course.

What to avoid

Outdated courses. If a resource still says Azure Active Directory throughout, does not mention Bicep or Container Apps, or has no section on Backup vaults and alert processing rules, it predates the current outline. Use it only alongside the official skills list.

Braindumps. They break Microsoft’s exam agreement, risk revocation of every certification you hold, and do not help with scenario questions that describe a situation rather than recite a fact.

Portal click-path memorisation. Menus move. The exam asks which setting, role, command or service meets a requirement, not where a button is.

A sensible order

  1. Read the skills outline once and take the official practice assessment cold.
  2. Work through the five domains using the documentation and the labs above, following the four-week study plan.
  3. Take the practice test and find your weakest domain.
  4. Go back to that domain’s documentation and repeat its lab.
  5. Book once you score 80% or more on realistic questions twice in a row.

Is this the right exam?

If you administer Azure or want to become an Azure architect, yes. If you mostly build back-end code, AI-200 fits better. See is AZ-104 worth it? for who benefits most.