Detailed Review Of Preparation

Let me start off by saying that AZ-104 certification exam is not an easy one. You need to have subject matter expertise implementing, managing, and monitoring an organization's Microsoft Azure environment.

It goes without saying the responsibilities for an Azure Administrator include implementing, managing, and monitoring identity, governance, storage, compute, and virtual networks in a cloud environment, plus provision, size, monitor, and adjust resources, when needed.

As per Microsoft, a candidate for this exam should have at least six months of hands-on experience administering Azure, along with a strong understanding of core Azure services, Azure workloads, security, and governance. In addition, this role should have experience using PowerShell, Azure CLI, Azure portal, and Azure Resource Manager templates.

Preparation Tips For The AZ-104 Exam

1. I prepared for around 2 hours each day and on the weekend around 4 hours. Overall it took me around month and a half to complete all the course and the labs. 
2. Create a free account with Azure to get the $100, create your own subscription and use it for your labs. This is a must to get familiar with the Service offered by Azure.  
3. I would highly recommend to get familiar with the syntax of both the Azure CLI and AZ Powershell. If you're not too familiar with it, start with the basics like create a resource group, then a subnet, a VM and so on. If you do for few times, you'll have the basis of the commands nailed down.
4. Some of the questions are lengthy and tricky. You need to understand possible dependencies and where to spot them to be able to answer questions quickly. The practice exams really helped. Link here. 
5. My weakest area was "Configure and manage virtual networking". I would highly recommend creating Virtual Network (VNET), subnets, Network Security Group (NSG), Virtual Machine (VM), test RDP, install webserver, create allow/deny rules etc to make yourself familiar with the entire Azure VNET ecosystem. 
6. Another important lab is around You can use Azure Web App in your free account and play around with it. Expect to see multiple questions there.
7. On the official Azure link it suggests to buy official practice test cost of which is $100. I would NOT recommend buying that.
8. I didn't get a lot of Kubernetes questions in the exam but I've heard some of my friends get not so easy questions there.
9. Another important topic is Azure Active Directory. Check the list of topics below in the Official Exam Guide. I must have received at least 6-7 questions there.
10. Some of the questions are lengthy and tricky. I would recommend to check them to be revisited at the end. If not sure of an answer, use the elimination process to get rid of options that are not applicable before making a guess.
11. Azure Documentation has a lot of tutorials and quickstarts. While you do not need to go through all the tutorials but doesn't hurt if you really want to understand the Azure Cloud in depth.

Good Luck on your exam.