AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator — Complete Exam Prep vs PMP Exam Prep Seminar - Complete Exam Coverage with 35 PDUs

The course is aligned to the five official AZ-104 exam domains: managing Azure Identities and Governance (Azure Entra ID, RBAC, subscriptions, resource groups), implementing and managing Storage (Blob, File, SAS tokens, lifecycle policies, backup), deploying and managing Compute Resources (virtual machines, scale sets, App Services, containers), implementing and managing Virtual Networking (VNets, NSGs, load balancers, VPN gateways), and monitoring and maintaining Azure Resources (Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, backups, alerts). The V6.0 May 2025 update added practice exam content, refreshed the Microsoft Entra ID modules, and expanded Azure Web Apps coverage. The curriculum totals approximately 17.5 hours of on-demand video — substantial enough to cover every exam objective at meaningful depth without the padding that inflates cheaper courses. Eleven downloadable resources and a free study guide PDF supplement the video content. The bonus "last-minute exam cram" is a three-hour focused review session specifically praised by learners who used it the day before their scheduled exam. The content limitation most frequently cited by learners is a structural consequence of Azure's continuous update cycle: Microsoft regularly changes the Azure portal interface, and some lab walkthroughs demonstrate configurations in interface versions that no longer match the current portal. Learners report that the underlying concepts remain accurate — the lab steps just require adaptation to the current UI when steps do not match.

Scott Duffy is a software architect and Microsoft Azure MVP (Most Valuable Professional) with the MVP award held continuously from 2022 to 2025. He has accumulated 1.5 million total students across his Udemy catalogue, making him one of the platform's most-enrolled cloud computing instructors. His background as a software architect rather than a pure trainer gives the course a practitioner's perspective — he explains architectural trade-offs and design rationale rather than simply narrating portal clicks. Learner feedback consistently describes Duffy as "well organized," with one opencourser.com review noting he "clarified a lot of issues in the first few lectures" in a way that set a strong conceptual foundation before moving into complex topics. His willingness to update the course repeatedly (six major versions, with V6.0 released May 2025) signals genuine investment in keeping the material current — a differentiator in a certification niche where many courses are recorded once and left to age. The criticism that appears across multiple three-star reviews is pacing: the course assumes some prior familiarity with cloud concepts, and learners who are new to Azure entirely may find some modules progress faster than they can absorb. Scott's AZ-900 (Fundamentals) course is the recommended prerequisite for those without prior Azure exposure.

The course lists at $119.99 but Udemy's promotional pricing structure means the effective purchase price is consistently $14–$15. At that price point, 17.5 hours of video plus a full practice exam, downloadable resources, a study guide PDF, and lifetime access with ongoing updates represents outstanding value in the certification preparation market. The AZ-104 certification itself costs $165 per exam attempt. A course that equips learners to pass on the first attempt — as documented by multiple first-attempt pass reports in blog coverage — has a total cost (course + exam) of approximately $180, compared to failing the exam once and retaking it ($330 total). The course's value calculation therefore extends beyond the purchase price to include avoided retake costs. The included practice exam was highlighted as a significant value addition in the V6.0 update. Prior versions required learners to purchase practice exams separately; having both preparation content and assessment in a single purchase at this price is notable. Learners who want more practice exams beyond the included set frequently cite Whizlabs or MeasureUp as well-regarded supplements at additional cost.

The AZ-104 certification maps to the Azure Administrator associate role — a job title with significant market demand across mid-size and enterprise organisations that have adopted Azure as their primary cloud platform. The course is therefore preparation for both a certification exam and a real job function. Multiple learners in blog coverage describe the course as directly applicable to their current administrative responsibilities: understanding the concepts in the networking module (VNets, NSGs, VPN gateways) is immediately useful for administrators managing Azure environments in production. The monitoring module (Azure Monitor, Log Analytics) addresses skills needed to maintain production systems rather than pass exam questions in isolation. The Malith Ileperuma documentation of passing the AZ-104 in fifteen days (studying four to six hours per day) while combining Duffy's course with hands-on Azure labs demonstrates the study pattern that produces the best outcomes: the course as conceptual framework, supplemented by actual Azure portal practice using Microsoft's free labs. Learners who only watch the videos without deploying resources in a real Azure subscription consistently report less confidence in exam and post-certification scenarios.

The course is one of the most complete PMP libraries on Udemy — 290 lectures across roughly 24.5 hours, mapped to the PMBOK Guide and split into the PMI exam's three domains (around 20 hours on ways of working, 9 on business acumen, 6 on power skills). Reviewers praise the depth of the worked case studies, the Earned Value Management and ITTO walkthroughs, and the formula coverage. The recurring content caveat is that some material reads as paraphrasing the PMBOK Guide and that the PMBOK 6-to-7 transition left a few coverage seams.

Joseph Phillips is the strongest part of the package and the reason most reviewers recommend it. A McGraw-Hill/AMA/Dummies Press project-management author with 25+ years of consulting and training experience, certified as PMP, PMI-ACP, ITIL, Project+ and a Certified Technical Trainer, he is repeatedly described as clear, articulate and good at breaking complex PMI concepts into understandable parts. The one consistent knock is that he does not answer messages — there is no real instructor interaction beyond the Udemy Q&A forum.

List price runs higher but the course is almost always on sale around $15-25 with lifetime access, and it delivers a genuine 35-contact-hour certificate that satisfies the mandatory PMI education requirement to sit the PMP exam — something most learners would otherwise pay a bootcamp hundreds or thousands of dollars for. That certificate alone makes it one of the best-value ways to clear the PMP eligibility hurdle, with the honest deduction being that you will likely buy a separate exam simulator for practice volume.

The weakest dimension and the one nearly every critical source flags. The course includes section quizzes, formula quizzes and two full-length 200-question practice exams, which is not nothing, but reviewers agree it is not enough question volume to be exam-ready and recommend buying a dedicated PMP simulator on top. There are also repeated complaints about quiz questions that are not covered in the lectures and a handful of wrong or unrevised answer keys.

The course has hundreds of learners crediting it with passing the PMP exam, often on the first attempt, and several describe a workable plan of pairing each PMBOK chapter with the matching lecture over about a month. The deduction is that almost no one passes on this course alone — the consistent advice across sources is to supplement with a separate question bank or simulator, so score movement depends on the learner adding practice the course does not fully provide.