AZ-204 Practice Question: Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Azure solutions
You need to monitor the CPU and memory usage of an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) over the last 30 days. Which Azure service should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Azure Monitor Metrics with Azure Log Analytics, mistakenly thinking that all monitoring data must go through Log Analytics, when in fact Metrics is the dedicated service for numerical performance data and provides built-in retention for the required 30-day period without extra setup.
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
✓
Azure Monitor Metrics
Azure Monitor Metrics is the correct service because it collects and stores numerical performance data (such as CPU and memory utilization) from Azure resources, including VMs, at near-real-time intervals and retains it for up to 93 days. This allows you to query and visualize metrics over the last 30 days using the Azure portal, REST API, or CLI, directly meeting the requirement without additional configuration.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure Service Health
Why it's wrong here
Azure Service Health provides a personalized view of the health of Azure services and regions you are using, notifying you about service outages, planned maintenance, and other health advisories that affect your subscriptions. It focuses on the status of the Azure platform itself, not the granular CPU and memory utilization of individual virtual machines within your subscription. Therefore, it is not the appropriate tool for monitoring specific VM performance metrics.
- ✗
Azure Advisor
Why it's wrong here
Azure Advisor analyzes your Azure resource configuration and usage telemetry to provide personalized, actionable recommendations across five pillars: cost, security, reliability, operational excellence, and performance. While it might suggest rightsizing a VM based on historical usage patterns, its primary function is to offer optimization advice, not to provide real-time or historical CPU and memory usage metrics for direct monitoring. It helps improve resource efficiency rather than displaying raw performance data.
- ✓
Azure Monitor Metrics
Why this is correct
Azure Monitor Metrics is specifically designed to collect numerical data from Azure resources, including virtual machines, at regular intervals. It stores time-series data for key performance counters such as CPU utilization, memory usage, disk I/O, and network traffic. This service provides the necessary infrastructure for storing, visualizing, and alerting on these granular performance metrics, making it the correct and primary tool for monitoring VM CPU and memory usage.
- ✗
Azure Log Analytics
Why it's wrong here
Azure Log Analytics, a component of Azure Monitor, is primarily used for collecting, indexing, and querying log data generated by resources, applications, and services. It excels at analyzing operational logs, security events, and diagnostic information, often in semi-structured or unstructured formats, using Kusto Query Language (KQL). While it can ingest some performance counters as log entries, its core purpose and optimal use case are for log analysis and correlation, not for high-frequency, numerical time-series metrics like CPU and memory usage.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-204 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-204 exam.