Finished AZ-700 last Friday with an 832. Coming from a network engineering background, 7 years mostly on-prem, I felt like I had a decent foundation but Azure networking has enough unique abstractions that experience alone doesn't carry you. The VNet peering, VPN Gateway SKU differences, and ExpressRoute topology questions require you to know Azure's specific model, not just generic networking concepts.
I spent 6 weeks total. Weeks 1–2: John Savill's AZ-700 study cram and the Microsoft Learn paths. Weeks 3–4: hands-on labs in a pay-as-you-go subscription, specifically building hub-spoke topologies and configuring Azure Firewall with policy inheritance. Weeks 5–6: practice exams exclusively, starting with MeasureUp and finishing with Whizlabs. I scored between 74–82% on practice exams going into test day.
The hardest section for me was Azure Virtual WAN — the topology options and routing policies are genuinely complex and the exam tests edge cases. I'd estimate Virtual WAN made up 18–20% of my exam. If you're not comfortable with it, that's where to focus. Private DNS zones and their integration with private endpoints was also heavily tested, maybe another 12–15%.
The hands-on lab time was non-negotiable. Reading and watching videos got me to maybe 65% comprehension. Actually configuring the resources got me to 85%+. You can't paper-study your way through VPN Gateway troubleshooting questions — you need to have seen those error states in real or simulated deployments.
John Savill's content is the best free resource for any AZ exam, full stop. The AZ-700 cram video alone is worth 3 hours of your time. Pair it with hands-on labs and you're in good shape going into test day.
Private DNS zones tripped me up too. The conditional forwarder plus private resolver setup is one of those things that sounds simple until you're troubleshooting a split-horizon scenario in a question.
832 is a strong score. The Virtual WAN section is brutal — I had a whole cluster of questions on secured hub configurations and routing intent that I wasn't prepared for. Ended up with a 761 which passed but I know exactly where I lost points.
Pay-as-you-go for labs is the right call. Some people try to do everything in free tier sandboxes and then can't spin up the resources they need. Spent maybe $40 on lab time over 2 weeks and it was worth every cent for the exam prep.
The 74–82% practice exam range going in and coming out with 832 is encouraging. I'm sitting for it in 4 weeks and hovering around 71% on practice exams right now. Sounds like there's room to close the gap with focused lab work in the last two weeks.
Man, this hits close to home. I'm in a similar boat — network background, full-time job, two kids — and fitting in study time was honestly the hardest part. What worked for me was just accepting that I'd never have a clean two-hour block. I did like 25-30 minutes every morning before anyone else woke up, and then maybe another chunk on my lunch break if it wasn't insane. It's not glamorous but it adds up faster than you'd think.
The VPN Gateway SKUs tripped me up way longer than they should have. I kept confusing the generation and performance tiers until I just sat down and drew it out by hand. For ExpressRoute I found that actually thinking through the traffic flow from on-prem to Azure helped more than memorizing the specs directly. Congrats on the 832 by the way, that's a solid score especially coming from a mostly on-prem background. Gives me some hope for my attempt next month.
Congrats on the 832! The thing that clicked for me was spending a full day just drawing out the VPN Gateway SKU comparison on paper. Not flashcards, not reading the docs again -- actually sketching which SKUs support active-active, which ones support BGP, what the throughput limits are. It sounds tedious but once I had that visual in my head the exam questions on gateway configuration felt way more manageable.
I'd also say don't sleep on ExpressRoute redundancy scenarios. I wasn't expecting that many questions around failover behavior and the difference between local vs standard vs premium circuits. If you've got a solid network background you might assume you know this stuff, but Azure puts its own spin on it and it's worth a few focused practice sessions before test day.