The AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator certification exam is designed for people who have experience in implementing, managing, and monitoring a Microsoft Azure environment. The exam will test your technical skills in implementing solutions based on different scenarios. Having prior experience in infrastructure management will help you understand the concepts and services easily.

The content of the exam will test your ability to perform the following:

• Manage Azure identities and governance

• Implement and manage storage

• Deploy and manage Azure compute resources

• Configure and manage virtual networking

• Monitor and back up Azure resources

For more information about the AZ-104 exam, you can check out this exam skills outline. This study guide will provide you comprehensive review materials to help you pass the exam with flying colors.

Study Materials

For the Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate exam, we suggest that you check out these study materials first before you take the actual exam. These resources will help you understand complex concepts and services that will be useful on your exam day.

1. Microsoft Learn – this website provides different learning paths for various Microsoft certifications. For the AZ-104 certification exam, you can focus on the following modules:

• Prerequisites for Azure administrators

• Manage identities and governance in Azure

• Implement and manage storage in Azure

• Deploy and manage Azure compute resources



• Configure and manage virtual networks for Azure administrators

2. Azure Documentation – these documentations contain an overview, tutorials, examples, and how-to guides that will help broaden your knowledge on different Azure services.

3. Azure Blog – to get updated on new technologies and offerings of Microsoft Azure, you can subscribe to their newsletter. 

4. Azure FAQs – you can find the FAQs section on the Azure documentation. The FAQs section is a compiled list of commonly asked questions, use cases, and comparison of several Azure services.

5. Azure free account – the Azure portal will help you get hands-on experience with its 12-month trial. You’ll also get free credits that you can spend for the first 30 days.

6. Tutorials Dojo’s Azure Cheat Sheets – with the help of our cheat sheets, you can easily understand the information found in the Azure documentation. These are presented in bullet point format to highlight the important concepts.

7. Tutorials Dojo’s AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator Practice Exams – our practice exams have always been regarded as the best in the market. Each question in our practice tests contains detailed explanations at the end of each set to help you digest important concepts that will help you pass your Microsoft Azure certification exam on your first try.

Azure Services to Focus On

Your primary source of information when studying for the AZ-104 certification exam is the Azure documentation. To comprehend the different scenarios in the exam, you should have a thorough understanding of the following services:

1. Azure Virtual Network – you should know how to create a VNet peering, security rules, configuration of private/public IP addresses, network interface, subnets, and virtual networks.

2. Azure DNS – the configuration of custom DNS, private, and public DNS zone.

3. Azure Application Gateway – you should know when to use a load balancer and a web traffic load balancer, and how to create a web application firewall.

4. Azure Load Balancer – the types of load balancing rules, the difference between a public load balancer, and an internal load balancer.

5. Azure VPN Gateway – know how to configure VPN and VPN gateway.

6. Azure ExpressRoute – understand the concepts of ExpressRoute and how you would implement it in your environment.

7. Azure Virtual Machines – learn how to deploy and configure a VM, scale sets, highly available solutions, moving and redeploying of VM, creating a backup, backup policy, and recovery services vaults.

8. Azure App Service – learn how to create an app service plan and what run time can be put in the same app service plan.

9. Azure Container Instances – understand the concepts of containers and how to use ACI.

10. Azure Kubernetes Service – the difference between ACI and AKS, the configuration of AKS.

11. Azure Blob – you need to learn how to configure storage accounts, import/export of data, storage tiers, replication, and authentication.

12. Azure Files – learn how to create a file share, file sync, copy data using AZCopy.

13. Azure Active Directory – you should know how to manage a user, group, guest accounts, joined devices, device settings, and best practices.

14. Azure RBAC – learn how to create and assign a role and the types of built-in roles.

15. Azure Policy – you need to learn how to read and create a policy.

16. Azure Monitor – you should know how to interpret metrics, the configuration of log analytics, query and analyze logs, set up alerts and actions, and other service features.

We suggest that you check out Tutorials Dojo’s Azure Cheat Sheets which provides bullet-point summaries of the most important concepts on different Azure services.

Validate Your Knowledge

If you’re feeling confident because you’ve followed the recommended materials above, it’s time to test your knowledge of various Azure concepts and services. For high-quality practice exams, you can use the Tutorials Dojo AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate practice exams.

These practice tests cover the relevant topics that you can expect from the real exam. It also contains different types of questions such as single choice, multiple response, hotspot, yes/no, drag and drop, and case studies. Every question on these practice exams has a detailed explanation and adequate reference links that help you understand why the correct answer is the most suitable solution. After you’ve taken the exams, it will highlight the areas that you need to improve on. Together with our cheat sheets, we’re confident that you’ll be able to pass the exam and have a deeper understanding of how Azure works.

Sample Practice Test Questions:

Question 1

1. Table and Queue only
2. Blob, Table, and File only
3. Blob, File, Table, and Queue
4. Blob and File only

Show me the answer!

Correct Answer: 4

The Azure Storage platform is Microsoft’s cloud storage solution for modern data storage scenarios. Core storage services offer a massively scalable object store for data objects, disk storage for Azure virtual machines (VMs), a file system service for the cloud, a messaging store for reliable messaging, and a NoSQL store.

AzCopy is a command-line utility that you can use to copy blobs or files to or from a storage account.

Azure Blob storage is Microsoft’s object storage solution for the cloud. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. Unstructured data is data that doesn’t adhere to a particular data model or definition, such as text or binary data. 

Blob storage is designed for:

– Serving images or documents directly to a browser.

– Storing files for distributed access.

– Streaming video and audio.

– Writing to log files.

– Storing data for backup and restore disaster recovery, and archiving.

– Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service. 

Azure Files enables you to set up highly available network file shares that can be accessed by using the standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. That means that multiple VMs can share the same files with both read and write access. You can also read the files using the REST interface or the storage client libraries.

One thing that distinguishes Azure Files from files on a corporate file share is that you can access the files from anywhere in the world using a URL that points to the file and includes a shared access signature (SAS) token. You can generate SAS tokens; they allow specific access to a private asset for a specific amount of time.

File shares can be used for many common scenarios:

– Many on-premises applications use file shares. This feature makes it easier to migrate those applications that share data to Azure. If you mount the file share to the same drive letter that the on-premises application uses, the part of your application that accesses the file share should work with minimal, if any, changes.

– Configuration files can be stored on a file share and accessed from multiple VMs. Tools and utilities used by multiple developers in a group can be stored on a file share, ensuring that everybody can find them and that they use the same version.

– Diagnostic logs, metrics, and crash dumps are just three examples of data that can be written to a file share and processed or analyzed later.

Hence, the correct answers are: Blob and File only.

The option that says: Table and Queue only is incorrect because Table and Queue are not supported services by AzCopy. 

The option that says: Blob, Table, and File only is incorrect because Table is not a supported service by AzCopy. The AzCopy command-line utility can only copy blobs or files to or from a storage account.

The option that says: Blob, File, Table, and Queue is incorrect. Although Blob and File types are supported by AzCopy, the Table and Queue services are not supported.

References:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-account-overview
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-use-azcopy-v10

Check out this Azure Storage Overview Cheat Sheet:
https://tutorialsdojo.com/azure-storage-overview/

Azure Blob vs. Disk vs. File Storage:
https://tutorialsdojo.com/azure-blob-vs-disk-vs-file-storage/

Question 2

Your organization has deployed multiple Azure virtual machines configured to run as web servers and an Azure public load balancer named TD1.

There is a requirement that TD1 must consistently route your user’s request to the same web server every time they access it.

What should you configure?

1. Hash based
2. Session persistence: None
3. Session persistence: Client IP
4. Health probe

For more Azure practice exam questions with detailed explanations, check out the Tutorials Dojo Portal:

Final Remarks

It is not enough to understand the concepts at a high level. You also need to get hands-on experience by using the Microsoft Azure Portal. Simulate different scenarios that will help you deepen your understanding of various services. The combination of practical and theoretical knowledge will help you analyze difficult questions in the exam. 

A few reminders that we can give is to always check the time and review your answers before proceeding to the next question (especially in the case study and yes/no questions). Before your scheduled exam day, don’t forget to take a good rest. If you’re not feeling confident yet, there’s always an option to reschedule your exam. Good luck, and we wish you all the best.