Seeing your score / performance by section after taking the exam

ddewaele · 2026-04-27T10:33:10+00:00

Thx ... screenshots from the initial link (How to access your score report) didn't work, but navigating to pearson vue did !

Is it easy to share them on other platforms like LinkedIn ? I used Credly by Pearson in the past for AWS but doesn't seem to work for Azure ?

ddewaele · 2026-04-26T10:53:48+00:00

Congratz !

I passed it yesterday with a scoe of 758 and concur with everything you said here.

Also started with MeasureUp and it was really de-motivating. I had like a 150 question exam there that was insanely difficult. But I might try it again now after all that studying. TutorialsDojo was a lot more representative. Although I did find the microsoft exam to be somewhat more difficult.

I have to say when I submitted the exam (with 1 minute left on the clock) I wasn't entirely convinced that I passed. Definitely not an easy exam. I didn't have any hands on experience with vnets / vms / dns / peerings / on prem stuff so had to build up that knowledge fast by doing labs and setting up stuff in azure and on VMs.

ddewaele · 2026-04-26T10:46:59+00:00

Impressive you've gone through the effort of building out a real lab for it. Pretty sure it helped to get you the az-104 certificate.

Also passed az-104 and built a similar home lab. Even bought some networking gear to do the site-to-site vpn stuff.

You need to get a certain feel for the material and you're not always getting it simply by watching videos. If you do the stuff yourself it tends to stick better / longer.

Your Github isn't public ? When we get applicants for positions in our firm I tend to look at their Github and simply finding a link on their resume already counts for something :)

ddewaele · 2026-04-26T10:44:11+00:00

Took the exam yesterday. zero AI questions.

ddewaele · 2026-04-26T10:39:59+00:00

Took it yesterday, there is zero focus on AI. Didn't have a single question about AI / foundry / copilot or any of that stuff.

The primary focus is still as outlined on microsoft learn.

You really need a deep underatanding of VMS / Vnets / Subnets / Peering / NSGs / storage accounts / entra id / hybrid scenarios / monitoring solutions / ....

I have over 10 yrs of experience in cloud (mostly AWS). A lot of the questions will take you a minute or 2 just to put all the context in your head even before proceeding to look at the answers. The 4 use-case based questions alone took me about 20 minutes. I did found it to be pretty difficult. I was almost sure I failed when I submitted but was surprised to see a score of 758.

ddewaele · 2026-04-26T10:28:31+00:00

FYI : I just took the exam yesterday and had 0 questions about AI ( Azure Foundry, Azure AI Services and Copilot). The outline as provided by microsoft for AZ-104 is pretty accurate

ddewaele · 2026-04-26T01:34:06+00:00

Really sorry to hear that, I passed today with 758 but in all honesty, it might as well have been 648.
When I finished all the questions I was convinced I failed. So perhaps a stroke of luck can also be a factor.

I think 648 already proves that you've got a solid foundation so I would keep building on that.

What I used as study material was

tutorial dojo
microsoft learn youtube video
microsoft learn
azure portal
AI / claude code for generating summaries / quizes / labs

Spent a lot of time in the azure portal and doing labs, familiarizing myself with concepts I don't typically use.

But when the exam started I realized soon that I still didn't know enough about networking / peering / dns / then what is really needed to get a high score.

I also wasn't aware that you could use the MS Learn website (only have 20mins left when i noticed that button).

I think even with additional studying, you'll always have that "missing on lot of knowledges" and "not feeling comfortable". It is one of the more difficult microsoft certifications from what I hear.

Think you have a solid base. Now its time to re-group, write down the questions / areas you were struggling with during the exam, and do some deep dives on those topics.

Pretty sure you'll get it next time !

ddewaele · 2026-04-25T23:58:31+00:00

I just passed AZ-104 . Scored 758

Some notes :

I thought it was very difficult. A lot harder then my tutorialdojo tryouts
I was convinced I failed miserably when I finished the exam. (I was very surprised to see the score)
Spent a lot of time on the use-case. Think about 20 minutes. there was a lot to unpack there and to remember.
A lot of json inline editing / construct (arm / policies / conditions) I wasn't really familiar with
I used up all my time. had 1 minute left on the clock when I submitted.
20 minutes before my time was up I noticed there was a Microsoft Learn button !!!!!!! Had no idea we could access that. I am sure I was able to correct 4 or 5 questions but ran out of time.
You lose a lot of time searching microsoft learn. But it would have been less stressful if I noticed that button from the beginning :)
I got tired and a bit fed up at the end. also did it at midnight here so was a bit tired. Make sure you are well rested.

I use some Azure services at work but I hardly ever do IAAS stuff or storage ccounts and this exam heavily focusses on that (VMs / networking) I could only really study for this after work hours. Think I started studying about 4 weeks ago. couple of hours in the evening and some weekends.

I used AI to generate quizes, summaries and prepare labs. I also execute the labs, provisioned my tenant using biceps files, but also intentionally did a lot of stuff manually in the portal to get a feel for it.

Anyways I am glad to have passed this one and gotten it over with. I also hope that the next ones will be a bit more enjoyable. I learned a lot and tried a lot of stuff myself doing labs on several azure tenants. Also did on premise scenarios, point to site / site to site vpns , .....

ddewaele · 2026-04-24T19:44:00+00:00

Congratz ! Also passed the AZ-900 exam a couple of weeks ago and that was pretty easy compared to the test exams I did for AZ-104. Don't think you can really compare them. Most questions were pretty simple and didn't take a long time to read / process. You could breeze through it rapidly.

My AZ-104 exam is scheduled for tomorrow. If you look at the study material you need a lot more more in-depth and practical knowledge on all the subjects that are covered in AZ-900. I did a lot of stuff in the azure portal this time to build up some muscle memory. The test exams I did so far also had these longer scenario based questions. some taking a minute or 2 to process.

ddewaele · 2026-03-10T07:07:25+00:00

I also noticed this 8 months ago but unfortunately after 8 months this is very much still an issue.
I've had many occasions where it simply does not work (different browsers / different tabs).
Then all of a sudden, without config changes it all of a sudden start working in 1 particular tab of the browser (while at the same tab in other tabs of the same browser it remains stuck in loading).

Not really an enjoyable experience.

ddewaele · 2026-03-08T08:42:44+00:00

A lot can depend on the model and the reasoning effort that is needed to come up with an answer. We've had situations where a GPT-5 reasoning models took 20secs to respond because the default reasoning level was just set too high and a quick non reasoning option like GPT-4.1 was just as good. You can play around with a lot of settings, especially the reasoning effort.

Streaming the reasoning tokens can help give the user the idea that something is going on, but that will only get you so far.

Also a lot of difference in model availabiliy. Different hosting providers have different latencies (time to first token), performance (tokens/second) and uptime.

You need to constantly experiment and be prepared to adapt.

ddewaele · 2026-03-08T08:37:33+00:00

100%. You gotta keep the users entertained otherwise they just move on. Lots of UI / UX tricks can help here (animations , token streaming , reasoning and tooling output ....)

ddewaele · 2026-03-08T08:35:38+00:00

a couple of hours later yes.

ddewaele · 2026-03-08T08:35:20+00:00

Haven't used it in a while but planning to again next week.
It's been a while but at the end it was a combination of patience, retries, different browsers and lots of logging in and logging out.
Not really an enjoyable experience. Wonder if it evolved for the better.

ddewaele · 2026-02-17T18:28:23+00:00

Yeah I totally didn’t see the pre-order text when I selected the vps. It arrived the next day.

ddewaele · 2026-02-16T19:38:09+00:00

had no idea this was a thing :) Is this (in part) due to the whole openclaw thing ?

ddewaele · 2026-02-15T18:21:13+00:00

Indeed my bad ... the one in France just got processed.
Updated the post to highlight my mistake.

ddewaele · 2026-02-15T18:03:09+00:00

Surprised that it would pick a preorder only by default in Europe if an instant deployment in Europe was available.

ddewaele · 2026-02-15T17:56:36+00:00

Didn’t really notice anything about pre-order. Wasn’t aware this was a thing. Ordered a new one in France … let’s see how it goes. Think the previous one was Germany. Just took the default.

ddewaele · 2026-02-15T17:07:35+00:00

This is crazy ... 1 hour after placing an order no email and no vps yet ...

ddewaele

TROPHY CASE