How to Pass AZ-104: A 6-Week Study Plan Weighted by the Official Domains

Six weeks at roughly an hour to an hour and a half a day is a realistic AZ-104 timeline for someone with some IT background: five weeks working through the five official domains with hands-on practice, then a final week of timed simulations. If you already administer Azure every day, compress it. If you have never used a cloud portal, add two weeks and consider starting with AZ-900.

The plan follows the official weights from the April 2026 skills outline, so the hours go where the points are.

Before week one

• An Azure subscription. You need to use the portal and the CLI yourself. New accounts include free amounts of many services; delete what you create at the end of each session to keep costs near zero.
• The official learning path for AZ-104 on Microsoft Learn.
• The official lab instructions. Microsoft publishes the AZ-104 course labs on GitHub in the MicrosoftLearning/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator repository. They are written for instructor-led courses but are easy to follow on your own.
• A baseline. Take the free Microsoft Practice Assessment or our free AZ-104 sample cold. The score does not matter yet. What matters is seeing which domain is weakest before you start.

The six weeks at a glance

Week 1: Identities and governance

Start here because everything else depends on it. Know the difference between Microsoft Entra roles and Azure RBAC roles, how role assignments inherit from management group to subscription to resource group to resource, and what Azure Policy does that RBAC does not. RBAC controls who can act; Policy controls what the resulting resources are allowed to look like. Locks, tags, budgets and cost alerts are quick points once you have configured each of them once.

Week 2: Storage

The traps are access methods and redundancy. Be able to say when to use an account key, a SAS token, a stored access policy or identity-based access, and what each redundancy option (LRS, ZRS, GRS, GZRS) survives. Configure lifecycle management, soft delete and versioning yourself, because questions describe those exact settings screens.

Week 3: Compute

The broadest domain. Deploy a VM from an ARM template or Bicep file at least once and read the template rather than just running it, since questions ask you to complete or fix one. Understand availability sets versus availability zones, scale set scaling rules, and App Service plans, scaling and deployment slots.

Week 4: Virtual networking

Give networking more time than its weight suggests. It is 15 to 20 percent, but questions combine NSGs, routing and peering in one scenario, and it is the domain candidates most often underestimate, as covered in the five AZ-104 mistakes. Practice reading effective security rules and predicting whether traffic will flow before you test it.

Week 5: Monitoring, backup and review

The lightest domain and the cheapest to finish. Know which tool answers which question: Azure Monitor for metrics, logs and alerts, Network Watcher for connectivity, Recovery Services vaults for backup, Site Recovery for failover. Spend the rest of the week on a full untimed practice attempt and on re-studying whichever domain scores lowest.

Week 6: Timed simulations

Switch to exam conditions: 100 minutes, no notes, no feedback until the end. After each attempt, review every wrong answer and every lucky guess. Re-study the weakest domain between attempts instead of immediately retaking.

The readiness test

Book the exam when all five domains clear the pass mark with margin across three consecutive attempts on fresh questions. An overall score can hide one weak domain, and one weak domain is enough to fail. If a domain stays stuck for three attempts, change how you study it, with more hands-on work or a different documentation page, rather than just repeating questions.

Remember that 700 is a scaled score, not 70 percent, which is another reason to leave margin.

Exam week

• Open the Microsoft Exam Sandbox once to see the interface and question types.
• If you test online, run the system check on the same computer and network you will use on the day.
• The day before, review only the notes for your weakest domain. No new material.
• During the exam, flag long scenarios and come back to them. Do not let one question take ten minutes.

Bottom line

Five weeks of domain-by-domain study with real hands-on work, weighted toward identity, compute and networking, then a week of timed simulations judged per domain. Our AZ-104 practice exam is built around that loop: practice by competency in weeks one to five, timed 0 to 1000 simulations in week six, and a per-domain report after every attempt. The AZ-104 bank also includes spaced-repetition flashcard decks for the facts that only stick with repetition.