AZ-104 Monitor and Maintain Azure Resources Practice Question
A VM suddenly stops responding, and the operations team needs to determine whether the issue is caused by a Microsoft platform problem or is isolated to that specific VM. Which two Azure portal features should be reviewed? Select two.
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse 'Service Health' with 'Resource Health' or think Azure Advisor can diagnose real-time outages, but the exam expects you to know that Service Health covers platform-wide issues while Resource Health is per-resource, and neither Diagnostic settings nor Action groups provide health status.
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
✓
Service Health
Service Health (A) provides a global view of Azure platform-wide issues, such as regional outages or service degradation, that could affect multiple resources. Resource Health (B) reports the health of a specific VM instance, indicating whether the VM is available, degraded, or unavailable, and whether the issue is due to a platform event or a user-initiated action. Together, these two features allow the operations team to differentiate between a Microsoft platform problem and an isolated VM issue.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Service Health
Why this is correct
Service Health is the correct first stop because it monitors the status of all Azure services across regions and subscriptions in one dashboard. When a VM stops responding, checking Service Health immediately reveals whether an active incident, advisory, or planned maintenance is affecting the VM's region, which separates a large-scale platform outage from a localized VM problem.
- ✓
Resource Health
Why this is correct
Resource Health provides a granular view of the individual VM's health, reporting if the resource itself is available, degraded, or unavailable along with the reason—such as platform-initiated events or guest OS failures. It allows the operations team to see that the VM is down due to a host-node problem or a planned reboot, but it does not offer the regional, multi-resource perspective needed to confirm a broad Azure incident.
- ✗
Azure Advisor
Why it's wrong here
Azure Advisor evaluates resources against best practices for high availability, performance, security, and cost, then generates proactive recommendations such as enabling backup or resizing a VM. It is not a real-time diagnostic tool and does not examine the current health state of a VM or a service, so it cannot distinguish a regional service disruption from an isolated resource failure explaining why the VM stopped responding.
When this WOULD be correct
When asked which Azure service provides personalized recommendations to optimize Azure resources for high availability, security, performance, and cost, Azure Advisor would be the correct answer.
- ✗
Diagnostic setting
Why it's wrong here
A diagnostic setting configures where platform logs and metrics from the VM or its host are exported—such as to Log Analytics, a storage account, or Event Hubs—but it is merely a data pipeline configuration. It does not interpret, summarize, or surface health status on its own; the operations team would still need a separate monitoring solution to analyze that telemetry and could not use a diagnostic setting alone to identify a service-level incident vs. a resource-level outage.
When this WOULD be correct
When the question asks: 'Which feature should be configured to send VM metrics and logs to a Log Analytics workspace for analysis?' or 'Which feature enables collection of guest OS performance counters and event logs for a VM?'
- ✗
Action group
Why it's wrong here
An action group is simply a collection of notification preferences—email, SMS, webhook, or ITSM—that are triggered by an alert, but it does not perform any health assessment or diagnosis. Even if an action group sends an alert that a VM is unresponsive, it cannot tell the team whether the cause is an Azure-wide outage, a failed update, or a guest OS hang, so it is only a downstream notification mechanism.
When this WOULD be correct
When a question asks how to configure email or SMS notifications when a VM becomes unhealthy, or how to trigger an automated runbook in response to a resource health alert, Action groups would be 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.
✓Service HealthCorrect answer▾
Why this is correct
Service Health is the correct first stop because it monitors the status of all Azure services across regions and subscriptions in one dashboard. When a VM stops responding, checking Service Health immediately reveals whether an active incident, advisory, or planned maintenance is affecting the VM's region, which separates a large-scale platform outage from a localized VM problem.
✗Azure AdvisorWrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
Azure Advisor provides recommendations for best practices in cost, security, reliability, and performance, but it does not offer real-time health status or incident information for a specific VM or platform issues.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
When asked which Azure service provides personalized recommendations to optimize Azure resources for high availability, security, performance, and cost, Azure Advisor would be the correct answer.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse Advisor's proactive recommendations with the reactive health monitoring needed for troubleshooting a current outage, assuming it can diagnose ongoing issues.
✗Diagnostic settingWrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
Diagnostic settings are used to configure streaming of platform logs and metrics to destinations like Storage, Event Hubs, or Log Analytics; they do not provide real-time health status of a VM or platform services, so they cannot determine if the issue is platform-wide or VM-specific.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
When the question asks: 'Which feature should be configured to send VM metrics and logs to a Log Analytics workspace for analysis?' or 'Which feature enables collection of guest OS performance counters and event logs for a VM?'
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse diagnostic settings with health monitoring tools, thinking that enabling diagnostics will show health status, or they may assume that reviewing diagnostic data can help identify the root cause of the outage.
✗Action groupWrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
Action groups are used to define notification and remediation actions for alerts, not to diagnose whether a VM issue is caused by a platform problem or isolated to the VM.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
When a question asks how to configure email or SMS notifications when a VM becomes unhealthy, or how to trigger an automated runbook in response to a resource health alert, Action groups would be the correct answer.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse the purpose of Action groups, thinking they help in diagnosing issues because they are associated with alerts, but they only define responses to alerts, not diagnostic information.
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
Service Health
Service Health is a monitoring feature in Microsoft 365 and Azure that provides real-time and historical status of cloud services, including outages, advisories, and incidents.
Key term
Azure portal
The Azure portal is a web-based, unified console that lets you build, manage, and monitor everything from simple web apps to complex cloud deployments using a graphical user interface.
About these practice questions
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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.