AZ-104 Exam Topics and Weights (April 2026 Update)

AZ-104 covers five skill domains in 100 minutes, and you need 700 out of 1000 to pass. The current skills measured took effect on April 17, 2026.

Here are the domains with the weight ranges Microsoft publishes, ordered as they appear in the official study guide.

The five domains

• Manage Azure identities and governance (20 to 25 percent). Microsoft Entra users and groups, external users, self-service password reset, built-in Azure roles and scope, Azure Policy, resource locks, tags, resource groups, subscriptions, cost alerts and budgets, and management groups.
• Implement and manage storage (15 to 20 percent). Storage firewalls and virtual networks, SAS tokens, stored access policies, access keys, identity-based access for Azure Files, redundancy, object replication, encryption, AzCopy and Storage Explorer, plus Azure Files and Blob Storage configuration including tiers, soft delete, lifecycle management and versioning.
• Deploy and manage Azure compute resources (20 to 25 percent). ARM templates and Bicep, virtual machines including encryption at host, disks, availability zones and sets, Virtual Machine Scale Sets, containers via Container Registry, Container Instances and Container Apps, and App Service including plans, scaling, TLS, custom DNS, backup, networking and deployment slots.
• Implement and manage virtual networking (15 to 20 percent). Virtual networks and subnets, peering, public IPs, user-defined routes, connectivity troubleshooting, network security groups and application security groups, effective security rules, Azure Bastion, service and private endpoints, Azure DNS, and internal and public load balancers.
• Monitor and maintain Azure resources (10 to 15 percent). Azure Monitor metrics, log settings, log queries, alert rules and action groups, Monitor Insights, Network Watcher and Connection Monitor, plus backup and recovery with Recovery Services vaults, backup policies, and Azure Site Recovery failover.

Where the study time should go

Weights are not the whole story, because domains differ in how much ground they cover per percentage point.

Networking is the clearest example. It sits at 15 to 20 percent, the same band as storage, but the objective list is longer and the concepts interact: an NSG question can also be a routing question and an effective-rules question at once. In practice it produces more wrong answers per percentage point than its weight suggests, which is why it shows up in the mistakes that fail people on AZ-104.

Monitoring is the opposite. At 10 to 15 percent it is the lightest domain, and much of it is recognizing which tool answers which question: Monitor for metrics and logs, Network Watcher for connectivity, Site Recovery for regional failover, Backup for restore. It is the cheapest domain to shore up in a final week.

What changed in April 2026

Microsoft publishes a change log with each revision. For the April 17, 2026 update, all five functional groups were marked "No change", and the changes were classified as minor within four areas:

• Configure Azure Files and Azure Blob Storage
• Create and configure virtual machines
• Provision and manage containers in the Azure portal
• Configure and manage virtual networks in Azure

The audience profile also had a minor revision. If you studied against the previous version, nothing structural moved. No domain was added, removed, or reweighted, so existing study plans remain valid.

A note on practice exam weightings

If you use a practice platform, it is worth checking whether its domain split actually matches the official ranges above. A simulation weighted differently from the real exam will mislead you about your readiness, usually by over-testing whichever domain the content author had the most material for.

Because Microsoft publishes ranges rather than fixed percentages, no platform can match the real exam exactly. The reasonable standard is that every domain sits inside its official range. Our AZ-104 practice exam reports your score per domain so you can compare your weak areas against the weights above rather than against an overall percentage.

Renewal

AZ-104 is an associate certification, so it expires 12 months after you earn it. Renewal is free and noticeably lighter than the original exam: an unproctored, open-book assessment on Microsoft Learn, taken during a six-month window before expiration, with unlimited attempts inside that window. Details are in our post on Azure certification expiry.

Bottom line

Five domains, 100 minutes, 700 to pass. Compute and identity and governance are the heaviest at 20 to 25 percent each, networking punches above its weight in difficulty, and monitoring is the cheapest domain to improve late. The April 2026 revision changed nothing structural.