5 Common Mistakes That Fail People on the AZ-104 Exam

AZ-104 (Azure Administrator) sits at a different difficulty tier than AZ-900. It expects hands-on familiarity with the Azure portal, PowerShell/CLI, and ARM concepts — not just definitions. Here are the mistakes we see most often in people who fail it.

1. Treating it like a memorization exam

AZ-104 loves scenario questions: "Given this constraint, which service/setting should you use?" If you only memorized service names without understanding when to use one over another (say, Azure Files vs Blob Storage, or NSGs vs Azure Firewall), scenario questions will consistently trip you up.

2. Skipping hands-on practice entirely

You do not need a huge Azure subscription bill to prepare, but you do need to have actually clicked through creating a VM, configuring a VNet, setting up a storage account with lifecycle policies, and assigning RBAC roles at least once. Reading about it is not the same as doing it — the portal's structure and terminology only stick after you've navigated it yourself.

3. Underestimating networking

Virtual networks, subnets, NSGs, peering, and DNS make up a meaningful chunk of the exam and are consistently the weakest area for candidates coming from a pure development background. If your competency report shows networking as a weak area, don't skip it — it will not go away on exam day.

4. Ignoring governance and cost management

Azure Policy, resource locks, tags, budgets, and cost alerts feel like "boring" topics compared to compute and networking, but they show up regularly and are easy points if you've reviewed them even briefly.

5. Not simulating time pressure

AZ-104 has a tighter time-per-question ratio than AZ-900. If your only practice has been untimed study sessions, the real exam's pace can catch you off guard. Run at least two or three full timed simulations before exam day so the pacing feels familiar, not stressful.

The fix for all five

Use your practice exam's competency breakdown after every attempt, not just at the end. If networking or governance keeps showing up as your weakest domain attempt after attempt, that is a direct signal — not a guess — about where the next study session should go. The AZ-104 practice exam breaks every attempt down by these exact domains so you can see it happening in real time.