Question 1easymultiple choice
Full question →easymultiple choiceObjective-mapped
Exhibit
Recovery Services vault > Backup jobs Job: Backup of vm-app-07 Status: Failed Error details: "Backup failed because the VM agent is not in a ready state." Additional note: The VM was created from a custom image.
Based on the exhibit, what should the administrator check first to resolve the backup failure for the Azure VM?
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
Increase the backup retention period in the vault policy.
Retention affects how long backups are kept, not whether the agent can run the job.
B
Best answer
Verify that the Azure VM Agent is installed and running on the VM.
Azure VM backups depend on a healthy VM agent so Azure can coordinate snapshot and extension operations. If the job reports that the agent is not in a ready state, the first troubleshooting step is to confirm the agent is installed, running, and up to date. Custom images sometimes miss the agent or contain a broken installation, which causes backup jobs to fail immediately.
C
Distractor review
Move the VM to a different availability zone.
Availability zones affect resilience, but they do not fix a missing or unhealthy VM agent.
D
Distractor review
Change the storage account redundancy to ZRS.
Storage redundancy is unrelated to the VM agent state and will not resolve the backup failure.
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: Verify that the Azure VM Agent is installed and running on the VM. — The error message points directly to the Azure VM Agent. Azure Backup relies on a healthy agent to coordinate backup operations on the guest. If the agent is missing, stopped, or not ready, the backup job can fail before any recovery point is created. Because the VM was built from a custom image, verifying the agent is the most practical first step and often resolves the issue quickly. Why others are wrong: Retention and redundancy settings do not influence whether the backup engine can talk to the VM. Availability zones improve resiliency, but they do not repair guest tooling. The failure is inside the VM backup dependency chain, so the correct first check is the VM agent rather than vault design or storage configuration.
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.
Discussion
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