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AZ-104 Monitor and Maintain Azure Resources Practice Question

A team is choosing the right Azure Monitor alert type for different operational signals. Match each alert type to the situation it is best suited for.

Drag a concept onto its matching description — or click a concept then click the description.

Concepts

Matches

Alerts on a numeric measurement such as average CPU, disk queue length, or memory utilization.

Evaluates a KQL query and alerts when matching records appear in a workspace.

Responds to subscription-level control-plane events such as create, delete, or policy changes.

Indicates that a specific Azure resource is unhealthy or unavailable.

Notifies on Azure platform incidents, advisories, or maintenance affecting a region or service.

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

✓

Metric alerts: Monitor numeric values

Metric alerts monitor numeric values; Activity log alerts on resource changes; Log alerts query log data; Smart detection finds anomalies; Resource health alerts on resource status; Service health alerts on Azure service issues.

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

✓
Metric alerts: Monitor numeric values
Why this is correct
Metric alerts are the correct choice when you need to monitor numeric, time-series data such as CPU percentage, memory utilization, or disk I/O. They evaluate these values against static thresholds (e.g., CPU > 90%) or dynamic thresholds that adapt to the resource's baseline. Alerts fire when the metric crosses the threshold for a specified evaluation period, enabling near-real-time incident response.
✓
Activity log alerts: Track resource changes
Why this is correct
Activity log alerts are designed to detect operational events recorded in the Azure activity log, such as resource creation, configuration changes, or deletions. They fire when a specific resource, resource group, or subscription-level operation occurs and can include conditions on operation name, status, or initiator. This supports governance, auditing, and change-control monitoring rather than performance tracking.
✓
Log alerts: Query log data for patterns
Why this is correct
Log alerts execute Azure Log Analytics queries on data collected from workspaces, VM insights, or other sources to identify patterns like repeated errors, failed login sequences, or unusual application traces. You define a query and a condition (e.g., result count > 0) with a scheduled frequency and time window. This allows alerting on multi-table logic and historical correlations that metric alerts cannot express.
✗
Metric alerts: Track resource changes
Why it's wrong here
This combination is incorrect because metric alerts are restricted to numeric metric values like latency, throughput, and error counts that are periodically sampled from Azure resources. Resource lifecycle events such as creation, modification, or deletion reside in the activity log, which is the domain of activity log alerts. Metric alerts have no awareness of administrative CRUD operations; they only alert on numerical threshold breaches.
✗
Activity log alerts: Monitor numeric values
Why it's wrong here
This pairing is invalid because activity log alerts monitor subscription-level event entries that contain action details, resource IDs, and operation outcomes in JSON, not numeric measurements. They react to what happened (e.g., VM deleted, policy changed) rather than how a resource is performing. Numeric monitoring is the explicit purpose of metric alerts, which collect and evaluate percentage and count-based metrics.

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AZ-104 Monitor and Maintain Azure Resources Practice Question

Why each option matters

Option-by-option breakdown

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