This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Flo
TL;DR
Preparing for an Azure certification like the AZ-104 is not about memorizing everything - it is about understanding patterns in the questions and topics. In this post, I will tell my experience about Azure exam preparation, so you know how to approach your own certification journey.
Introduction
Azure certificates are among the harder to pass certificates available in the software industry. When looking up information online, you will often see comments or posts about how hard to pass some Azure exams are...
I myself was fairly insecure how I should handle preparation for my AZ-104 exam because of that. And it was for the good: You must seriously prepare for your Azure certificate to pass the exam.
As I would have loved to have someone coaching me before approaching my Azure journey. I want to do exactly that for you! Tell you about my pattern-based preparation approach, and give some general information that I would have loved to have on hand.
Where to Start?
Before even thinking about exam prep, make sure to choose the right certificate for your personal situation. There are multiple different certification paths available, inform yourself at Microsoft´s information page or read some posts on your favorite platform (e.g. Dev.to, Reddit ...).
My personal hint when it comes to certificate selection: Match your current skill level. This does not only allow you to prepare for the exam in a reasonable timeframe, it is also the way Azure wants you to move forward. Many exams require certificates as prerequisite for one another. E.g. the AZ-305 professional requires the AZ-104 associate.
For sure you would be able to take multiple exams shortly after one another or skip some certs overall, to show for a job interview that you are at an even higher level. This is exactly what I aimed to do starting my way with Azure. And it might be a strategy that works.
But be aware, that there is not only knowledge required for exams to be learned from Microsoft’s material. There is additional knowledge and experience expected from your professional background with Azure. You might be able to make up for that missing experience with enough learning and preparation, but it is the hard way. Be aware that such a tactic requires more preparation time and exam experience, so it might be a bad choice for someone starting with certificates overall.
Preparation Material
After selecting the right certificate for your personal background and goals, get familiar with the learning material available. Not only the expected amount of knowledge for an Azure exam is huge, also is the material available for preparations out there.
Microsoft Resources
The default preparation material everyone gets to see is on the overview page of each Azure certificate. There are different kinds prepared by Microsoft on their MS Learn platform:
- MS Learn: Exam Courses - Microsoft offers self-directed learning courses for each certificate, which covers all topics required for the exam. E.g. For the AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator exam. The Course AZ-104T00-A: Microsoft Azure Administrator.
- MS Learn: Documentation - Microsoft offers openly available documentation for all Azure resources and Microsoft products. This is the reference for all topics of your exam and a great tool for information about the ecosystem overall. Even better, the MS Learn page is available in some exams to look up details, so it pays off to have experience using it.
- MS Learn: Prep Videos - Some certificates even have dedicated learning videos to get into the topics easier (e.g. the videos to start with the az-104 exam). Even if they are linked at the certificate overview page, I personally did not get involved with them from the start up. Do not make the same mistake and start with these videos into the exam topics.
- MS Learn: Learning Assessment - To get a feeling how real exam questions are working, Microsoft offers a practice assessment. A multiple choice quiz with questions close to a real exam. This is a great way to get a feeling for the real exam, but do not become to confident about a high score. Often there is a limited amount of questions and more work needed to pass the real thing reliably.
- MS Learn: Exam Sandbox - Besides the practice assessment, which does not use the same UI as the real exam, there is a Exam Sandbox to get familiar with its user interface. It does not include any questions related to your exam but provides a great opportunity to peek into your exam session.
External Resources
While most Microsoft resources are well prepared and a great start, external providers are offering learning resources as well. As there are so many providers and kinds of resource, that I would not be able to list all of them, I want to introduce the two most common types:
- External Courses - For additional information about your cert´s topics there are courses available for free on platforms like YouTube (e.g. the channel free code camp offers some great free videos). Also some paid services like Pluralsight or Tutorialsdojo offer courses as an addition to Microsoft´s content with high quality.
- Exam Dumps - When searching around YouTube or Google, there are some sites and videos with "real exam questions" coming up for all kinds of certs. These vendors are often trying to sell you some packages including hundreds of "real exam questions". While some of the questions are really close to the ones in the exams, they are many times outdated or served with a wrong answer. These dumps can be a great to get a feeling for the exam questions overall. But be careful when relying to much on this type of material.
Process
Next, we want to look at the most important part of each preparation. You can think of it as 2 major steps towards your exam:
Basic Knowledge: In this first step, you want to understand what the exam is all about.
Deep Dive: In the second step, you need to transfer knowledge and get the context and patterns needed for the exam.
Basic Knowledge
After you made the decision to acquire one of Azure´s exams, you will first need to get into exam´s topics. This is the part where you are preparing for the exam the „good old" way by going through Microsoft´s preparation materials and remembering all the information about Azure´s products.
Your most important overview of the exam topics, is the topic overview of your exams study guide. It is a list of all topics needed for your exam. Make sure to have the guide for your respective exam always on hand. You will find the overview directly at the exam page (e.g. the study guide of the AZ-104 exam). Become familiar with each of the listed topics. Your first step will automatically be the Microsoft Learn exam courses. Focus especially on the practical exercises coming up, which will guide your through a learning version of the Azure Portal, as practical knowledge is fairly likely to be tested in the exams.
I myself intensively went through all the learning paths, and went through most practical exercises for my AZ-104 exam. This took me at least a good 2 days, but was worth it.
After finishing the exam courses, you will feel at least 80% ready for the exam. But do not get fooled to much. After doing your first learning assessment, you will probably be back on the ground. For most exams you might be at around 30% of your preparation journey now - just to throw in a guess. Ask yourself:
- Do I feel confident enough to explain all the exam topics to another dev?
- Am I missing any of the exams topics?
You should be able to explain each topic of the overview at least on the surface level now. If you are missing a topic, move to different sources besides the learning path. I would suggest to get your hands on one of two other leaning products:
If you are generally unfamiliar with the topics of the exam or Azure,
consider a learning course of an external provider. There might be a freely available YouTube video. Consider a paid one too, if there are no free high quality options. Be careful about one thing: Outdated resource. Most exams do not change often. But if you encounter topics in Microsoft external guides you never heard of before, compare them with the study guide overview.
If you are familiar with the Azure world,
Read the MS Learn documentation about the topics missing or shortcoming in the learning paths. This is feeling hard, but it will get you into all details to understand what’s going on.
Now you should be prepared for all topics of you exam, one last personal hint before moving to the next step: Work with flash cards. I created 500 flash cards for my AZ-104 exam, covering the basic fundamentals of each topic. This helped me a lot to remember all the basic information. A great tool to keep your knowledge fresh and remember things effectively.
Deep Dive
After understanding all exam topics, you probably did some learning assessments already. Maybe you realized, that some of the details required in the questions are really detailed. Maybe you even thought that you would not be able to remember all of the little details about all topics at all. That´s where it gets interesting. To solve this issue, you will need to be able to transfer knowledge, apply it to new situations and find patterns for your exam. That´s what I am calling it the pattern-based approach.
The Deep Dive is - because of that - not only about remembering all topics entirely. It is about finding the patterns in the topics that are relevant for your exam, which will get you through the exam safely. Do be fooled - It is true that you can not learn all details of all products. But you can learn which patterns are used in the question and prepare to transfer these patterns to the questions in your exam. Let’s make an example to show you the twist.
This is a question example as it might appear in the AZ-104 practice assessment:
Question: Your Microsoft Entra tenant and on-premises Active Directory domain contain multiple users.
You need to configure self-service password reset (SSPR) password writeback functionality. The solution must minimize costs.
Which Microsoft Entra ID edition should you use?
Select only one answer.
- Microsoft Entra ID Free
- Microsoft Entra ID P1
- Microsoft Entra ID P2
Answer: Only Microsoft Entra ID P1 and P2 support SSPR, but Microsoft Entra ID P1 is the lower cost option.
To know the correct answer to this question you must be aware of the different Entra licenses and their features. This might have been one of the details about Entra ID that you probably did not remember even with preparation in the first step. But after reading this questions you understood a first pattern: There are multiple Entra licenses with different features.
This is not the only question of all AZ-104 questions related to Entra licenses and the features coming with the respective license. Take a note here: You want to search for patterns like that. If there is a question related to Entra licenses and the features coming with it, be aware of all Entra licenses and all the features coming with the different ones because that might be a pattern coming up for all license tiers and features. Sounds easy right.
To make an example, the following question could be one of the questions coming up in the real exam as well. It could look like this:
Question: Your Microsoft Entra tenant and on-premises Active Directory domain contain multiple users.
You need to enforce MFA for specific SaaS apps integrated with SSO The solution must minimize costs.
Which Microsoft Entra ID edition should you use?
Select only one answer.
- Microsoft Entra ID Free
- Microsoft Entra ID P1
- Microsoft Entra ID P2
Answer: Only Microsoft Entra ID P1 and P2 support MFA with SSO, but Microsoft Entra ID P1 is the lower cost option.
Azure works exactly with patterns like that. Make sure that you focus on patterns and learn all the little details included in the patterns.
But how do you find questions to extract patterns from?
- Learning Assessment: Use the questions Microsoft offers in its learning assessments. They are easy accessible and cover many patterns.
- Exam Dumps: For everyone, who is searching around for more information online, you probably already found some kind of exam dump. They might not always have the correct answer for all questions, neither are all of these "real exam questions" real exam questions. But these dumps are a great source for patterns as well.
After all, you know your learning type and how you remember information the best way for yourself. But when it is about what kind of information is important for the exam. Focus on Patterns.
Surroundings
Besides the obvious preparation - learning things - there are some soft skills supporting you to pass the exam.
Multiple Choice Questions
Most questions in Azure exams are multiple choice questions. That is great, because these kind of questions are not about the exact details, they are about understanding the options available to cross out wrong answers. Follow one famous rule for multiple choice: Do not get into to much thinking about the right answer, just try to figure out which ones are not the right one.
Time Management, Exam Design & MS Learn
There is not lots of time in your Azure certificates exam, but from my perspective the time is not rushing to fast either. One thing that might get you into trouble is the option to open MS Learn in the exam (which is possible in many, but not all, exams). It is tempting to look up details you do not know. But do not spend to much time doing so. Go through the questions you can answer first, mark the ones you can not answer and before finishing a section of the exam, search for all MS Learn details at once with a fixed number of minutes. So you will be able to manage your time properly.
Be aware that most exams are divided into multiple sections. You will not be able to repeat all question at the end, each sections is like a mini exam that is over as soon as you finished it. So be aware of the structure and plan your MS Learn time accordingly.
Some of the sections are designed, so you can not answer a question twice. Be aware of such details and read the descriptions in the exam carefully. After all, clicking through the exam sandbox is a great way to get the feel for the exam user interface.
Wrap Up
This is the final "pass the exam" checklist:
- Take the right exam for your skill level
- Get familiar with the available materials
- Learn all topics the "hard way"
- Use some additional materials, if the Microsoft one are not sufficient for all topics
- Focus on patterns and understand them
- Do not mess your time management up
Hope you are now feeling ready to finally book an exam ;)
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Flo
Flo | Sciencx (2025-11-09T10:13:42+00:00) How to pass AZ-104 or any other Azure Certificate. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/11/09/how-to-pass-az-104-or-any-other-azure-certificate/
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