---
title: How to lab for Microsoft Exams
description: How to get hands-on lab experience for Microsoft certification exams using Azure, Microsoft 365 tenants, free trials, cost controls, and practice environments.
---

:::tip
Use this page when your [Business](/prepare/business/), [Fundamentals](/prepare/fundamentals/), or [Role-Based](/prepare/role-based/) preparation guide recommends hands-on practice. Browse the [exam lab collections](/labs/) for available Microsoft Learn and Microsoft GitHub exercises tied to individual exams.
:::

# Why lab for Microsoft Exams?

Role-based Microsoft exams (associate, expert, specialty) test your ability to use Microsoft products and understand them. Labbing is the only way to get close to working with the products unless you actually work with them at your job.

**Azure:**

Labbing in Azure is one the easiest but also the most dangerous way to lab Microsoft Cloud. You can very easily set up a free or pay as you go account and start creating resources.

However, if you are not careful, you can easily create resources that will add up to a huge bill. Always make sure you are familiar with product pricing, set up cost controls, monitor your usage and delete resources when you are done.

## Product Pricing

### [Official Pricelist](https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing#Pricing-by-product?WT.mc_id=studentamb_165290)

Azure product pricing lists are publicly available. The prices are also shown in the Azure portal when you create a resource but they are usually incomplete because there are many features that don't have the pricing displayed.

### [Azure Pricing Calculator](https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/calculator?WT.mc_id=studentamb_165290)

The Azure Pricing Calculator is a tool that allows you to estimate the cost of your Azure resources. You just select products you are interested in them, fill in the usage parameters, and it will provide an estimated cost.

## Cost Controls

### [Budgets](https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/cost-management-billing/costs/tutorial-acm-create-budgets?WT.mc_id=studentamb_165290)

Budgets allow you to set alerts on your Azure subscription. These can be both for current cost and predicted cost by the end of month. I recommend setting up both types of alerts to make sure both your current and predicted cost makes sense. Besides normal alerting, you can also set up automations that will react on the alerts. For example some students have set up automation that automatically deleted everything in the subscription when they reach budget.

### [Anomaly Cost Alerts](https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/cost-management-billing/understand/analyze-unexpected-charges#create-an-anomaly-alert?WT.mc_id=studentamb_165290)

Anomaly cost alerts work similarly to budgets but they alert you when there is anomaly cost increase in your subscription. This is useful to alert you in case you miscalculated product cost but it is also very sensitive if your baseline azure subscription price is really low and you deploy basically anything that costs money.

### Microsoft Azure Free account

**Microsoft 365:**

Microsoft 365 labbing is a lot less accessible than Azure labbing because there is no way to just spin up an instance as part of your personal account. You need to create tenant and sign up for M365 trials or subscriptions.
:::tip
Are you a Microsoft Partner employee or Visual Studio Subscriber?

Microsoft Partner employees get access to [CDX](https://cdx.transform.microsoft.com/) where you can spin up demo tenants.

Visual Studio Subscribers get access to [Microsoft 365 Developer Program](https://developer.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/dev-program) where you can spin up a developer tenant. It is not full E5 but better than nothing.
:::

There are 2 ways to get a tenant. You can either sign up for a trial using one of the links below, or you can create a [fresh tenant](https://signup.microsoft.com/createaccount?culture=en-us\&scenario=PartnerCenter\&origin=pc). These are not all available trial options, but they are some of the most useful ones for labbing.

### Microsoft 365 E5 (no Teams) — 1 month

### Teams Premium — 1 month

### Microsoft Entra Suite — 1 month

### Priva Privacy Risk Management — 3 month

### Windows 11 Enterprise — 90 days

Be extremely careful when creating tenants in M365 because your credit card will be tied to them and it is very easy to let licenses run and get charged for them.

M365 E5 license currently costs $60 a month and E7 $100 a month. Always make sure you cancel licenses before they convert to paid. Also when buying subscription be careful about what you are buying.

Microsoft offers discounts if you commit your licenses to a year but it also means you won't be able to cancel and will be on the hook for the whole year.