AZ-104 Monitor and Maintain Azure Resources Practice Test 3 — 15 Questions

Question 1

You need to suppress alert notifications for a group of virtual machines every Sunday during a planned maintenance window, without deleting the underlying alert rules. What should you configure?

Accepted Answer

Create an alert processing rule for the maintenance window.. An alert processing rule (formerly action rule) allows you to apply actions or suppress notifications for specific alert rules during defined time windows without modifying the underlying alert rules. By configuring a suppression action rule for the maintenance window (every Sunday), you can prevent notifications from being sent while the alert rules remain active and continue to evaluate conditions.

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Disable diagnostic settings during the maintenance window.

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Delete and recreate the alert rules every week.

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Move the VMs to a different subscription on Sundays.

Question 2

You need to collect performance counters and event logs from multiple Azure virtual machines and query the data centrally by using Kusto Query Language. Which Azure resource should you deploy?

Accepted Answer

A Log Analytics workspace. A Log Analytics workspace is the correct Azure resource because it ingests performance counters and event logs from Azure virtual machines via the Azure Monitor agent or the legacy Log Analytics agent, and stores them in a centralized repository. You can then query this data using Kusto Query Language (KQL) to perform real-time analysis, troubleshooting, and reporting across multiple VMs.

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A Recovery Services vault

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Azure Network Watcher

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A load balancer

Question 3

You want Azure to recommend ways to reduce cost, improve performance, and strengthen security across your subscriptions. Which service should you use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Advisor. Azure Advisor is the correct service because it provides personalized recommendations across your Azure subscriptions to optimize for cost, performance, reliability, and security. It analyzes your resource configuration and usage telemetry, then generates actionable recommendations such as right-sizing underutilized VMs, enabling geo-redundant storage, or applying security rules. This directly matches the question's requirement for a unified tool that suggests improvements in all three areas.

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Azure Policy

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Azure Backup

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Virtual network peering

Question 4

Your company needs to retain Azure Activity Log data longer than the built-in retention period and make it available for future analysis. What should you configure?

Accepted Answer

Diagnostic settings for the Activity Log. Azure Activity Log has a default retention period of 30 days for Standard tier subscriptions and 90 days for others. To retain data longer, you must configure diagnostic settings to stream the Activity Log to a Log Analytics workspace (for long-term querying) or to an Azure Storage account (for archival). Diagnostic settings allow you to define the retention duration beyond the built-in limit, enabling future analysis.

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A CanNotDelete lock on the subscription

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An availability set

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An NSG flow log only

Question 5

You need to receive an email when average CPU usage on VM-App01 exceeds 85 percent for 10 minutes. Which Azure Monitor components should you configure?

Accepted Answer

A metric alert and an action group. A metric alert monitors a specific Azure resource metric (like CPU percentage) and triggers when a condition (e.g., average > 85%) is met over a specified evaluation period (e.g., 10 minutes). An action group defines the notification actions (e.g., sending an email) when the alert fires. Together, they fulfill the requirement to receive an email based on a performance threshold.

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A resource lock and Azure Advisor

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An activity log alert only

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A budget alert

Question 6

You want Azure to identify underutilized virtual machines and recommend ways to reduce cost and improve security posture. Which service should you use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Advisor. Azure Advisor analyzes Azure resources and provides recommendations related to cost, security, reliability, performance, and operational excellence.

Answer

Azure Policy

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Azure Backup

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Virtual network peering

Question 7

You need to collect Windows event logs and performance counters from multiple Azure virtual machines and query the data by using Kusto Query Language. Which Azure resource should you use?

Accepted Answer

A Log Analytics workspace. A Log Analytics workspace is the correct Azure resource for collecting Windows event logs and performance counters from Azure VMs and querying them using Kusto Query Language (KQL). It serves as the central repository where diagnostic data is ingested via the Azure Diagnostics extension or the Log Analytics agent, enabling rich log analytics and custom KQL queries.

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A Recovery Services vault

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Azure Network Watcher

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A load balancer

Question 8

You need to notify the operations team by email when average CPU utilization on VM-App01 exceeds 80 percent for 15 minutes. Which Azure Monitor components should you configure?

Accepted Answer

A metric alert and an action group. A metric alert monitors a specific performance metric (like CPU utilization) and triggers when a threshold is exceeded for a defined duration. An action group defines the notification action (e.g., sending an email) when the alert fires. Together, they meet the requirement to email the operations team when average CPU exceeds 80% for 15 minutes.

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An activity log alert only

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A resource lock and Azure Advisor

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A budget alert

Question 9

Your company must retain Azure Activity Log data beyond the built-in retention period and make it available for long-term analysis. Which configuration should you use?

Accepted Answer

Diagnostic settings for the Activity Log. Azure Activity Log is retained by default for 90 days. To store data beyond this period for long-term analysis, you must configure diagnostic settings to route the Activity Log to a Log Analytics workspace (for querying) or an Azure Storage account (for archival). This is the only native mechanism to extend retention and enable long-term analysis.

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A ReadOnly lock on the subscription

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An availability set

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NSG flow logs only

Question 10

You want Azure to identify security improvements, underutilized resources, and cost-saving opportunities across your subscriptions. Which Azure service should you use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Advisor. Azure Advisor is the correct service because it provides personalized recommendations across five categories: Reliability, Security, Performance, Operational Excellence, and Cost. It analyzes your deployed resources and usage patterns to identify security improvements (e.g., missing network security groups), underutilized resources (e.g., idle virtual machines), and cost-saving opportunities (e.g., reserved instance purchases). This aligns directly with the question's requirement for a unified service that delivers these insights across subscriptions.

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Azure Policy

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Azure Backup

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Virtual network peering

Question 11

Based on the exhibit, the OS disk on a production VM is corrupted, but the VM must stay in place and keep its NIC and data disks. Which restore option should you choose?

Accepted Answer

Restore the disk, then attach or swap it as needed to repair the existing VM.. When an OS disk is corrupted, you can restore just the disk from a recovery point and then either attach it as a data disk to the existing VM or swap the OS disk. This approach preserves the VM's NIC, data disks, and IP configuration, meeting the requirement to keep the VM in place.

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Restore the VM as a new virtual machine and delete the existing one immediately.

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Use Azure Monitor to roll back the last deployment automatically.

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Enable a diagnostic setting on the VM so the OS disk will be repaired.

Question 12

An administrator accidentally deletes a VM backup item from a Recovery Services vault. The company wants a built-in protection feature that helps recover the deleted backup item during the retention window. Which feature is this?

Accepted Answer

Soft delete. Soft delete is a built-in protection feature for Azure Recovery Services vaults that preserves deleted backup data for an additional 14 days (default retention period) after deletion. When a backup item is accidentally deleted, soft delete retains the data in a 'soft deleted' state, allowing administrators to recover it within the retention window before permanent deletion occurs. This feature is enabled by default for new vaults and helps prevent data loss from accidental or malicious deletions.

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Archive tier

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Availability zones

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Private endpoint

Question 13

Based on the exhibit, you want the resource logs for the storage account to appear in Log Analytics so you can investigate read and write failures. What should you configure?

Accepted Answer

Add a diagnostic setting that sends resource logs to the Log Analytics workspace.. Diagnostic settings in Azure allow you to stream resource logs (such as StorageRead and StorageWrite logs) from a storage account directly to a Log Analytics workspace. By configuring a diagnostic setting with the appropriate log categories enabled, you can query and analyze read and write failures in Log Analytics without additional infrastructure.

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Create a metric alert rule on the storage account and link it to an action group.

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Enable a resource lock so the storage account cannot be modified.

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Move the storage account to a different subscription that already has Log Analytics enabled.

Question 14

Based on the exhibit, compliance requires one backup every week to be kept for 52 weeks, in addition to the daily backups already configured. What should you change in the backup policy?

Accepted Answer

Add a weekly retention rule that keeps one weekly recovery point for 52 weeks.. The requirement is to retain one weekly backup for 52 weeks, in addition to the existing daily backups. Adding a weekly retention rule that keeps one recovery point per week for 52 weeks directly satisfies this requirement by ensuring that each weekly backup is retained for the full year, while daily backups remain unaffected. This is the correct approach because Azure Backup allows granular retention policies with multiple rules for different frequencies (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly).

Answer

Increase the daily retention from 30 days to 365 days.

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Change the vault to use soft delete so backups are retained for 52 weeks.

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Create a metric alert to warn the team when backups are older than seven days.

Question 15

A line-of-business app must keep serving users if an entire Azure region becomes unavailable. Is Azure Backup by itself enough to meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

No, you also need disaster recovery replication such as Azure Site Recovery. Azure Backup is designed to protect data by creating recovery points that can be used to restore VMs or files, but it does not provide automatic failover or continuous replication to another region. To meet the requirement of keeping an app running during a regional outage, you need a disaster recovery solution like Azure Site Recovery, which replicates VMs to a secondary region and enables orchestrated failover with minimal downtime.

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Yes, because backup alone guarantees immediate failover to another region

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Yes, as long as the VM has a backup policy

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Yes, if diagnostic settings are enabled on the VM