The Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certification is designed to check one’s skills in applying, managing, and monitoring the Microsoft Azure environment of an organization. The certified administrator is able to use, manage, and monitor identity, storage, compute, governance, and virtual networks in a cloud environment, as well as to monitor and adjust resources when required. Since it’s a role-based certification, you should have at least 6 months of hands-on experience administering Azure and a good understanding of the main Azure services, Azure security, workloads, and governance. Also, your expertise in working with Azure CLI, Azure portal. Azure Resource Manager, and PowerShell is required. And to complete the whole process, passing one exam is needed to become certified.
To gain the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certification, you have to pass the AZ-104 exam. It’s a 100-minute test that comprises 40-60 questions of various types. The exam is priced at $165. The exam content consists of 5 domains.
The first one is focused on managing Azure identities and governance. It means that you should be able to manage Azure AD objects, such as create administrative units, users, group, and manage guest accounts, user and group properties, and device settings. In addition, your skills to manage role-based access control along with subscriptions and governance will be checked.
The second domain checks your skills to use and manage storage. It means that you should be proficient in configuring storage accounts and access to Azure Files, exporting from and importing to Azure job, using Azure Storage replication, configuring blob object replication, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure File Sync service.
The third section is dedicated to the deployment and management of Azure compute resources. Thus, you should be able to use Azure Resource Manager templates to automate deployment of VMs. To be more precise, your skills to configure a virtual hard disk, deploy from virtual machine extensions, modify an Azure Resource Manager template will be assessed. Besides, you should be able to configure VMs, containers, and Azure App Service.
The fourth section is centered on configuring and managing virtual networking. Thus, you should be ready to demonstrate your skills in configuring virtual networks, endpoints on subnets, and private endpoints, implementing subnets, Azure Firewall and Bastion, as well as security rules and troubleshooting load balancing. In addition, you should be able to monitor and troubleshoot virtual networking and use an Azure virtual network to integrate an on-premises network.
The fifth domain is all about monitoring and backing up Azure resources. Here you will have to perform your skills in configuring Azure Monitor logs, Application Insights, interpreting metrics, setting up actions and alerts. Additionally, creating a Backup vault, backup policy, and demonstrating site-to-site recovery with the help of Azure Site Recovery will also be checked.
As stated on the Ziprecruiter website, the annual salary of Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate holders is about 107,683. Still note, that having more profound skills, these figures can transform into $185,500.