You’re staring at your exam results. The score report says 680. You needed 700. You were close—so close that close feels worse than bombing it completely. You studied. You took practice tests. You thought you knew the material. But the Microsoft Azure Administrator (AZ-104) exam had other ideas.
This is the moment where most candidates either give up or repeat the same study mistakes that got them here. Neither works.
What Most Candidates Get Wrong About This
You think AZ-104 is a test of Azure knowledge. It’s not. It’s a test of Azure operations—the difference matters enormously.
The exam doesn’t care that you can describe what a virtual network is. It cares that you can troubleshoot why a VM can’t reach a storage account. It doesn’t ask you to name the benefits of managed disks. It asks you to resize a disk on a running VM without losing data—and pick the right sequence of steps.
Most candidates spend 60% of study time on foundational concepts and 40% on scenarios. You need the opposite. You need 60% scenario-based practice and 40% concept reinforcement.
Here’s what else trips people up: they skip the labs. They watch videos instead of actually configuring resources in the Azure Portal. When exam day comes, they freeze because they’ve never actually done the thing—they’ve only read about it or watched someone else do it.
The score report backs this up. Failed candidates usually score lower on question types that require hands-on knowledge: “Which Azure CLI command would you run?” “What happens if you select this setting?” “Put these steps in the correct order.” These aren’t memorization questions. They’re experience questions.
The Specific Problem You’re Facing
You failed. Your score was somewhere between 650 and 700. You were in the danger zone—close enough to feel like you should have passed, far enough to know something fundamental is broken in your prep.
Here’s what your score report probably showed you: you scored highest on topics like “Manage identity and governance” (maybe 85%) but got crushed on “Manage compute resources” (maybe 62%) or “Manage storage” (maybe 68%). That pattern tells a story. The theoretical topics are clickable. The operational topics aren’t.
The exam has five main domains, each worth a percentage of your total score:
- Manage identities and governance: 25–30%
- Implement and manage networking: 20–25%
- Manage compute resources: 20–25%
- Manage storage: 10–15%
- Monitor and maintain Azure resources: 10–15%
If you’re failing, you’re probably weak in two of these three: networking, compute, or storage. These are operational domains. They require hands-on work.
You also likely made a strategic mistake: you studied breadth when you should have studied depth. AZ-104 tests configuration—specific step sequences, specific settings, specific CLI commands. One wrong click ruins the answer.
A Step-By-Step Approach That Works
Step 1: Stop watching videos. Start building labs.
You have 3 weeks until your retake (or whatever timeframe you’re working with). Every single day, you need to log into the Azure Portal and do one real task:
- Day 1: Create a virtual network with three subnets, add a network security group, and configure rules to allow RDP from a specific IP range.
- Day 2: Deploy a VM into that network, attach a managed disk, and extend the volume without stopping the VM.
- Day 3: Create a storage account, configure blob containers, set up lifecycle policies, and test access using a shared access signature (SAS).
This isn’t busywork. This is building muscle memory. When you see an exam question that says “You need to configure Azure CLI to authenticate without interactive login,” your hands already know the answer because you’ve done it.
Microsoft Learn has free sandbox environments. Use them. Do the hands-on exercises, not just the reading paths.
Step 2: Identify your weak domain using your score report.
Your failed exam report listed your performance by domain. Circle the lowest one. That’s your leverage point.
If it’s “Manage compute resources”: spend 40% of your remaining time on VM sizing, scale sets, availability sets, and Azure Batch.
If it’s “Implement and manage networking”: focus on virtual networks, subnets, route tables, load balancers, and VPN/ExpressRoute.
If it’s “Manage storage”: hammer storage accounts, blob tiers, file shares, backup, and recovery.
Don’t study equally. Study your weak domain until the score report becomes balanced.
Step 3: Use targeted practice tests—not full exams.
Full practice exams feel productive. They’re not. You already know how to take a full exam. What you need is domain-specific depth.
Use a practice test platform (Whizlabs, ExamPro, or MeasureUp) and take only the questions from your weak domain. Get 15 questions on storage. Miss three. Review those three. Take 15 more on storage. Miss one. Keep going until you hit 90%+ consistently.
Only after you’ve hit 90% on your weak domain do you take a full practice exam.
Step 4: Master the question types that failed you.
Review your exam results. You’ll see breakdowns by question type: multiple choice, multiple select, drag-and-drop, hot spot, and case studies.
If you bombed multiple-select questions, you know the problem: selecting all correct answers, not partial credit. Practice those relentlessly.
If case studies destroyed you, you need to read 10 more case scenarios per week—complex, multi-step scenarios where one wrong assumption cascades through the whole answer.
What To Focus On (And What To Skip)
Focus on this:
- Hands-on portal configuration (not reading about it)
- Azure CLI commands with real syntax (not approximations)
- The order of steps matters—get it wrong, the scenario fails
- Networking scenarios: VPN connections, route tables, NSG rules
- VM scenarios: sizing, scaling, availability, backup
- Storage scenarios: tiers, replication, access tiers, lifecycle
- Identity scenarios: role assignments, managed identities, conditional access
Skip this:
- Theoretical deep-dives into how Azure’s backend works
- Historical information about old Azure features
- Edge cases that affect 0.1% of real jobs
- Azure pricing (it won’t be on the exam in detail)
- Services that aren’t in the AZ-104 exam blueprint (Kubernetes, Functions, Logic Apps—save those for other certs)
The exam blueprint is published by Microsoft. Get it. Cross-reference it with your weak domain. Study only what’s on the blueprint.
Your Next Move
Here’s what you do right now:
Tonight: Log into Microsoft Learn. Find the hands-on module for your weakest domain. Complete one exercise, actually configuring resources, not just reading. Screenshot your result.
This week: Spend one hour every day in the Azure Portal (free tier or sandbox environment) configuring real scenarios. Pick one domain. Master it.
Next week: Take a domain-specific practice test on that domain. Target 90%.
Week three: Take a full practice exam. Score above 720 before you schedule your retake.
That’s your plan. Not theory. Not motivation. Action.
Book your retake date right now. Put it on your calendar. The specificity forces accountability. Then get into the Portal and build something.