AZ-104 Monitor and Maintain Azure Resources Practice Question
A customer wants official information about whether an Azure service issue is affecting their subscription or the wider Azure platform. Which two sources should they check? Select two.
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure Service Health (subscription-specific) with Azure Status (global platform health) and may pick Azure Advisor or Backup center because they sound like they could provide health information, but they serve entirely different monitoring and maintenance functions.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Azure Service Health
Azure Service Health (B) provides personalized alerts and guidance when Azure service issues affect your subscription, including planned maintenance and health advisories. Azure Status (D) offers a global view of the health of all Azure services across regions, which is the official source for widespread platform issues. Together, they cover both subscription-specific and platform-wide service incidents.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure Advisor
Why it's wrong here
Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that analyzes your deployed resources and usage patterns to recommend best practices for cost optimization, security, reliability, and performance. It does not publish or surface real-time service incidents, outages, or maintenance events. Advisor focuses on improving your configuration based on telemetry, not on reporting the operational status of Azure itself, making it wrong for outage information.
When this WOULD be correct
Azure Advisor would be correct in a question asking for a tool that provides best practices and recommendations to improve reliability, security, cost, and performance of Azure resources, such as 'Which Azure service provides personalized recommendations for resource optimization?'
- ✓
Azure Service Health
Why this is correct
Azure Service Health provides a personalized view of the health of Azure services and regions used by your subscriptions. It surfaces active incidents, upcoming planned maintenance, and health advisories that directly affect your resources, based on your selected subscriptions and regions. This is the official, tenant-aware channel for service-impacting events, making it the correct source for outage information tailored to your environment.
- ✗
Backup center
Why it's wrong here
Backup center is a unified management experience for backup operations across your organization, allowing you to monitor backup jobs, configure policies, and manage restored items. It does not provide any incident, outage, or health status information about Azure platform services. Its purpose is operational management of backup and restore workflows, not service health monitoring, so it is incorrect for this use case.
When this WOULD be correct
A question asks: 'Which Azure service should you use to centrally manage and monitor backups across your environment?' Backup center would be the correct answer.
- ✓
Azure Status
Why this is correct
Azure Status is the global public status page (status.azure.com) that displays the current availability of every Azure service across all regions. It offers a broad, unfiltered view of any platform-wide outages or degradations, but it is not personalized to your specific subscriptions, resources, or regions. While it is a valid source for official outage information, it lacks the granularity needed to assess impact solely on your environment.
- ✗
Resource Graph
Why it's wrong here
Resource Graph is a querying service that allows you to explore and inventory Azure resources across subscriptions using the Resource Graph query language. It gives you low-level metadata about resource type, location, tags, and properties, but it has no capability to report service incidents, health advisories, or outage status. It is designed for resource management and governance, not for monitoring the health of the Azure platform, so it is incorrect.
When this WOULD be correct
A question asking: 'Which tool allows you to query and explore Azure resources across subscriptions using KQL?' would make Resource Graph the correct answer.
Option-by-option analysis
Why each answer is right or wrong
Understanding why wrong answers are wrong — and when they would be correct — is what separates a 750 score from a 900. The AZ-104 exam frequently reuses these exact scenarios with slightly different constraints.
✓Azure Service HealthCorrect answer▾
Why this is correct
Azure Service Health provides a personalized view of the health of Azure services and regions used by your subscriptions. It surfaces active incidents, upcoming planned maintenance, and health advisories that directly affect your resources, based on your selected subscriptions and regions. This is the official, tenant-aware channel for service-impacting events, making it the correct source for outage information tailored to your environment.
✗Azure AdvisorWrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
Azure Advisor provides personalized recommendations for optimizing Azure resources, not real-time service health or outage information. It does not offer official status updates on service issues affecting subscriptions or the wider platform.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
Azure Advisor would be correct in a question asking for a tool that provides best practices and recommendations to improve reliability, security, cost, and performance of Azure resources, such as 'Which Azure service provides personalized recommendations for resource optimization?'
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse Azure Advisor's recommendations with health monitoring, assuming it can detect and report service issues, but its focus is on optimization rather than incident status.
✗Backup centerWrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
Backup center is used to manage and monitor backups, not to check for Azure service issues affecting a subscription or the wider platform.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
A question asks: 'Which Azure service should you use to centrally manage and monitor backups across your environment?' Backup center would be the correct answer.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse 'service health' with 'backup health' and think Backup center provides similar status information about Azure services.
✗Resource GraphWrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
Resource Graph is a query tool for exploring Azure resources, not for monitoring service health or outages. It does not provide official information about Azure service issues affecting a subscription or the platform.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
A question asking: 'Which tool allows you to query and explore Azure resources across subscriptions using KQL?' would make Resource Graph the correct answer.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse Resource Graph with a monitoring or health tool because its name suggests it provides an overview of resources, but it lacks real-time service health data.
Analysis generated from the official AZ-104blueprint and verified against question context. The “when correct” sections are what AI assistants cite when candidates ask “what’s the difference between these options?”
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Managed Identities for Azure Resources
Key term
Subscription
A subscription is a payment model where you pay a recurring fee to access a product or service instead of buying it once and owning it forever.
Key term
Azure Service Health
Azure Service Health is a personalized dashboard that provides real-time information about the health of your Azure services, including current and past outages, planned maintenance, and advisory messages.
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every AZ-104 question from scratch — 1,049 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-104 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the AZ-104 exam.