AZ-104 Study Roadmap

Start by reading the Microsoft certification page and AZ-104 study guide. The study guide is the map: identities and governance, storage, compute, virtual networking, and monitoring and maintenance. Write down which tasks you can perform in Azure today and which ones you only recognize by name.

Begin with Microsoft Entra ID users and groups, SSPR, RBAC scopes, Azure Policy, locks, tags, subscriptions, management groups, budgets, and Azure Advisor recommendations. Then move into storage accounts, SAS, stored access policies, access keys, identity-based Azure Files access, redundancy, object replication, encryption, AzCopy, Storage Explorer, blob tiers, soft delete, snapshots, versioning, and lifecycle management.

For compute, practice ARM or Bicep interpretation, VM sizing, disks, encryption at host, resource moves, availability zones and sets, scale sets, Azure Container Instances, Azure Container Apps, Azure Container Registry, and App Service configuration. For networking, draw VNets, subnets, peering, public IPs, UDRs, NSGs, ASGs, Bastion, service endpoints, private endpoints, DNS, and load balancing paths.

Monitoring is where many administration scenarios come together. Practice interpreting Azure Monitor metrics, configuring diagnostic settings, querying logs in Log Analytics, creating alert rules and action groups, using Network Watcher and Connection Monitor, configuring Recovery Services vaults, creating backup policies, restoring data, and understanding Site Recovery failover.

Use practice review to choose the next topic, not to chase local totals. If you miss RBAC questions, review role scope and inheritance. If storage questions are weak, compare access methods and redundancy. If networking questions are weak, trace NSGs, routes, DNS, and endpoints. If monitoring questions are weak, separate metrics, logs, alerts, backup reports, and recovery actions.