You need an alert that emails administrators when CPU on VM-DB01 exceeds a threshold. Which two Azure Monitor components work together to achieve this?
This is the standard pairing for threshold-based alerting with notifications.
Why this answer
A metric alert monitors a specific performance metric (like CPU percentage) on a target resource (VM-DB01) and triggers when the value crosses a defined threshold. An action group defines the notification actions (e.g., sending an email to administrators) that execute when the alert fires. Together, they form the core alerting workflow in Azure Monitor: the metric alert evaluates the condition, and the action group delivers the response.
Exam trap
The trap here is that candidates confuse 'budget alerts' (cost-based) with 'metric alerts' (performance-based), or assume that activity logs capture VM-level metrics like CPU, when they only record control-plane events.
How to eliminate wrong answers
Option B is wrong because a budget alert monitors Azure spending against a cost threshold, not VM performance metrics, and a private DNS zone is used for custom domain name resolution within a virtual network, not for alerting. Option C is wrong because a Recovery Services vault manages backup and disaster recovery (e.g., Azure Backup, Site Recovery), not real-time performance monitoring, and a route table controls network traffic flow via user-defined routes, not alerting. Option D is wrong because an activity log export sends subscription-level operational events (e.g., resource creation) to a Log Analytics workspace or storage account, not CPU metrics, and a lock prevents accidental deletion or modification of resources, not alerting.