Use Microsoft Learn resources

Microsoft has produced a lot of great resources to help with your learning. Within the Microsoft Learn site, they provide a course overview and links to their documentation. They also offer access to learning sandboxes for specific tasks for free. So if you are learning on a budget, you can use these sandbox environments to practice without incurring any charges on your subscription.

Understand your objective domain

For each exam Microsoft supply an objective domain or blueprint. This gives you an indication of the subject matter covered and what skills are being measured. Below is the high-level overview of the AZ 103 exam.

· Manage Azure subscriptions and resources (15-20%)

· Implement and manage storage (15-20%)

· Deploy and manage virtual machines (VMs) (15-20%)

· Configure and manage virtual networks (30-35%)

· Manage identities (15-20%)

The percentages are supplied to give you an idea of the number of questions you find in the various areas. On the Microsoft Learn site they also supply a more comprehensive PDF that gives you more details on what is measured in each of the competency areas.

The current AZ-103 PDF can be found here

The certification objective domains are reviewed every two months. If you are planning to take more than a couple of months, you will need to check the objective domains to ensure there have been no changes or additions to the course syllabus.

Before starting revising for the exam you can use the objective domain to assess your knowledge against the various areas. Build5nines.com has created a useful assessment tool for AZ 103, but this could easily be modified for any of the other Microsoft exams.

Don’t worry about Preview features.

During your study, you will learn the various features and resources available in Azure. You will also notice a wide array of Preview features available for many of the resources. Although available for you to play around with and get a feel for the extra features, these Preview features are not included in the exam.

Answer all the questions

With all Microsoft exams there is no negative marking. If you get a question wrong, you don’t lose any marks. Therefore if you do not know the answer it is better to guess than leave the answer blank. You can also get partial credit for multi-stage answers even if you don’t get the entirely correct answer you can still get credit for the parts of the question you do get right.

The pass mark for Microsoft exams is 700 out 1000, so even if you do not get all the questions right, you still have a chance of passing.

Azure CLI interactive mode

Mike Pfeiffer, mentioned this on his Podcast for cloudskill.fm , when taking the exam if you forget a PowerShell or Azure CLI command knowing how to use help can save you valuable time.

Within the Cloud console, you can enable the interactive mode of the Azure CLI with the command “az interactive”. Once enabled, the cloud shell will look similar to this, giving you additional information about the commands and available arguments.