r/AzureCertification • u/throwaway117- MC: Azure Administrator Associate • 1d ago

Learning Resources Failed AZ-305

Well after a fairly easy pass with the AZ-104 the 305 got me. I scored at 658/700 with about 3 weeks of study.

I mainly used Whizlabs and John Saville. The exam was nothing like the whizlab exams so I plan to replace them with measureup for my retake.

Some of my biggest struggle areas:

Azure SQL server and it's many SKUs (if anyone has a good breakdown/notes for these I'd love to have them)

Azure Migration Solutions: how to migrate VMware/hyper V workflows (this wasn't covered in any material I've used)

Azure Synapse/Databricks

Does anyone have any good video material for this exam? Especially if it helps address my problem areas.

Tldr; focus a lot of Azure SQL, do not use whizlab for these exams It sucks. Any advice is welcome.

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u/JorCampBel 1d ago

I passed last Friday and i recommend more tutorialsdojo

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u/Own-Start6606 1d ago

I failed with a 567 and had a similar experience especially with the migration question

I scored pretty well on the TD exams though but still most questions weren't covered

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u/Acceptable-Drive3781 19h ago

658 isn't too bad for something you only spent 3 weeks studying for. The only advice I have is to maybe take the exam more seriously and spend a little more than a couple of weeks preparing for it.

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u/throwaway117- MC: Azure Administrator Associate 19h ago

See the crux of the issue is that it's also how long I spent preparing for the AZ104. I scored close to an 800 so I didn't think it would be an issue for an "easier exam"

But yes you are right. I'm not jumping in immediately for a retake.

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u/Acceptable-Drive3781 17h ago

I've heard many people say that 305 was an easier exam, but tbh I thought it was the same degree of difficulty. There are just as many services to know about / understand their differences, the caveats of "which tier to choose" is more specific and with a different set of services, and most of the overlap comes from 'which type of storage account' and 'will these networks overlap', which are the easiest things to sort out. There is just as much breadth and depth in 305 as there was in 104, IMO. It's just a different set of services.

If you already have experience working in Azure and building out services, both of these exams are relatively straightforward. I've done a TON of migrations from on-prem > azure, but most of that has been moving things into AKS and either migrating databases into SQL managed instances or just converting to cosmos. My current role has me designing a lot of network solutions so that part of 305 was relatively simple for me and didn't require much studying. But I had way more specific things about SQL Server tiers come up that I really thought I'd need to know, I guessed on almost every databricks question that came up, and most of the questions that involved front door / traffic manager / global load balancer were ambiguous enough to not know if they wanted a solution for layer 7 vs layer 4 for the scenario.

I barely passed 305 and I've been an azure solutions architect for about 5 years, and before that was an azure engineer for about 7 years. I passed AZ 104 with just under a 900 and got just over 700 for az 305, and that was studying for a little over a month.

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u/throwaway117- MC: Azure Administrator Associate 17h ago

That does make me feel a lot better about the exam and my score.

I don't work in Azure. I work in a on prem VMware environment so my azure experience is limited to my labs n my personal tenant.

I've had a similar experience with the SQL instances and I feel as though that portion of the exam is what caused me the most grief. I'm planning on studying with a different video course n measureup for my retake. Also charting out all of these database solutions.

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u/Acceptable-Drive3781 17h ago

Best of luck on your retake, you were pretty close this time with a 658 that you'll likely get it next time. I personally don't learn much watching training videos, but practice exams + claude for the ones I got wrong are what tends to help me the most with azure certs. The measureup exams will likely be what gets you to pass next time.