An operations team manages an Azure virtual machine scale set that hosts a stateless API. They already collect guest logs in Log Analytics, but they do not want to ingest extra performance data just to watch CPU. They need an alert when average CPU across the scale set stays above 80% for 10 minutes, and the notification must support email and a webhook. What should they configure?

Create a diagnostic setting on the scale set and build a log query alert for CPU samples.

This sends or queries data after ingestion and is unnecessary for a native CPU threshold.

Configure an autoscale rule and rely on its notification settings for alerting.

Autoscale can react to load, but it is not the best fit for a dedicated operational alert requirement.

Install a monitoring extension that writes CPU readings to storage for later review.

Writing custom CPU samples to storage adds management overhead and does not provide native Azure alerting behavior.

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 an Azure Monitor metric alert on the scale set CPU metric and attach an action group. — Azure Monitor metric alerts are the best choice when you need a threshold-based alert on a built-in platform metric such as CPU. The alert can evaluate directly against the scale set metric without sending additional data to Log Analytics. An action group then delivers email and webhook notifications. This satisfies the requirement to keep telemetry ingestion costs low while still alerting on sustained high CPU. Why others are wrong: Diagnostic settings and log queries are unnecessary because CPU is already exposed as a platform metric. Autoscale can change capacity, but it is not a general alerting solution and may not provide the exact notification workflow requested. A custom extension that writes CPU readings to storage is operationally heavier, delays alerting, and does not use Azure Monitor’s native metric-alert path.

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.