AZ-305 Practice Question: Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions
A company wants to collect metrics and logs from all Azure resources in their subscription, including custom metrics from their applications, and create dashboards and alerts. Which Azure service should they use as the primary monitoring platform?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Azure Monitor with its sub-services like Log Analytics or Application Insights, failing to recognize that Azure Monitor is the umbrella service that encompasses both metrics and logs, while the others are specialized components within it.
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
Azure Monitor is the correct primary monitoring platform because it serves as the single, unified ingestion and analysis service for all metrics and logs across Azure resources, including custom metrics from applications via the Application Insights SDK or the custom metrics API. It provides a consolidated workspace for creating dashboards, setting alerts, and querying data, making it the foundational service for observability in Azure.
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 Monitor
Why this is correct
Azure Monitor is the comprehensive, unified monitoring service that acts as the single pipeline for collecting platform metrics, activity logs, resource logs, and custom telemetry across all Azure resources. It stores metric data in a time-series database and log data in Log Analytics workspaces, then provides a unified query experience, dashboards, and alerting actions. This centralization is what makes it the correct answer for collecting both metrics and logs from every resource in an Azure environment.
- ✗
Azure Log Analytics
Why it's wrong here
Azure Log Analytics is a functional component inside Azure Monitor, specifically the workspace and query engine that ingests and analyzes log data using the Kusto Query Language (KQL). It does not itself collect metrics or logs for all resources; rather, diagnostic settings must route telemetry from Azure resources into a Log Analytics workspace. Because it depends on Azure Monitor's ingestion pipeline and only handles the log analytics side, it is not the overarching collection platform.
- ✗
Azure Application Insights
Why it's wrong here
Azure Application Insights is designed for application performance monitoring (APM), capturing telemetry such as page views, requests, dependencies, exceptions, and traces from live web applications. It can also accept custom metrics via the SDK/API, but it lacks the built-in, agentless collection of platform-level metrics and resource logs from infrastructure services like virtual machines, Azure Storage, or virtual networks. This application-focused scope is why it cannot serve as the unified collector for all Azure resources.
- ✗
Azure Service Health
Why it's wrong here
Azure Service Health delivers a personalized view of Azure status, alerting you to service incidents, planned maintenance, and advisories that affect the Azure services you use. It works at the level of Azure platform health rather than individual resource telemetry, so it does not receive custom metrics or log streams from your deployed resources. Its purpose is situational awareness of global and regional Azure infrastructure, not resource-level monitoring.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-305 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-305 exam.