Question 1mediummultiple choice
Full question →mediummultiple choiceObjective-mapped
A production virtual machine is experiencing intermittent performance spikes. The operations team wants an alert when average CPU usage stays above 80 percent for 10 minutes and wants email and SMS notifications sent automatically. What should the administrator configure in Azure Monitor?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
A
Distractor review
Create a log search alert on the VM performance data and attach a resource lock.
Log search alerts can work, but a lock only prevents changes and does not notify anyone when CPU rises.
B
Best answer
Create a metric alert on Percentage CPU and associate an action group with email and SMS receivers.
Metric alerts are the best fit for near real-time threshold monitoring of Azure platform metrics such as CPU. An action group delivers the notification channels, such as email and SMS, when the alert fires. This design meets both parts of the requirement: detect sustained CPU pressure and notify the operations team automatically without needing log ingestion or manual polling.
C
Distractor review
Assign an Azure Policy definition to the VM to stop it when CPU exceeds the threshold.
Azure Policy can audit or enforce configuration, but it does not monitor CPU in real time or send operational alerts.
D
Distractor review
Enable diagnostic settings on the VM and send the data only to a storage account.
Diagnostic settings collect telemetry, but sending data only to storage does not create an alert or route notifications.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic
NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
- PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
- Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
- NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.
TExam Day Tips
- Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
- Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
- Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.
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More questions from this exam
Keep practising from the same exam bank, or move into a focused topic page if this question exposed a weak area.
Question 1
A route table contains these entries: 10.0.0.0/8 with next hop Virtual appliance, and 10.1.1.0/24 with next hop Virtual network gateway. Which next hop will Azure use for traffic to 10.1.1.5?
Question 2
You are deploying a stateless web application on Azure virtual machines. The solution must automatically add and remove instances based on CPU demand and allow all instances to be managed as one logical group. Which Azure compute feature should you deploy?
Question 3
You are deploying a Windows Server VM for an internal app. The VM must support Secure Boot and vTPM later, its OS disk must survive host moves, and the team wants the lowest-cost managed disk tier that still behaves like a normal writable OS disk. Which two choices should you make? Select two.
Question 4
You need to deploy several identical virtual machines and ensure that the failure of a single Azure host does not affect all of them. Which feature should you use?
Question 5
You need to connect VNet-Hub and VNet-Spoke so that resources in both virtual networks can communicate privately over the Microsoft backbone. Both virtual networks are in the same region. What should you configure?
Question 6
You need to create a storage account that provides the lowest-cost redundant storage for non-critical data and only needs protection against local disk or server failure within a single datacenter. Which redundancy option should you choose?
FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this AZ-104 question test?
Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Create a metric alert on Percentage CPU and associate an action group with email and SMS receivers. — Azure Monitor metric alerts are designed for threshold-based monitoring of platform metrics such as Percentage CPU. Because the requirement is to trigger after 10 minutes above 80 percent and send email and SMS notifications, the alert should be linked to an action group. The action group handles the notification methods, while the metric alert handles the condition evaluation. This is the most direct and cost-effective operational setup for VM performance monitoring. Why others are wrong: Log search alerts depend on log ingestion and are unnecessary for a simple CPU threshold on a native Azure metric. Azure Policy does not monitor runtime performance or send notifications. Diagnostic settings are useful for exporting telemetry, but by themselves they do not evaluate conditions or notify the team. The correct approach is to pair a metric alert with an action group.
What should I do if I get this AZ-104 question wrong?
Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.
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