AZ-305 Practice Question: Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions
This AZ-305 practice question tests your understanding of design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions. Match the stated requirement to the specific cloud service, access model, or configuration option — many options are valid in isolation but not for this scenario. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
Refer to the exhibit. You are implementing an Azure Policy to control VM SKU deployment. You assign this policy to a subscription. A developer attempts to deploy a virtual machine with SKU Standard_DS2_v2. What is the outcome?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
The deployment is denied.
The Azure Policy in the exhibit uses a 'deny' effect, which explicitly blocks any deployment that does not match the allowed VM SKUs. Since Standard_DS2_v2 is not in the allowed list, the policy engine evaluates the request during deployment and rejects it before any resource is created. This results in the deployment being denied entirely, not just audited or flagged.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
✗
The deployment is audited and logged.
Why it's wrong here
Effect is deny, not audit.
✗
The deployment is allowed.
Why it's wrong here
The condition notEquals triggers deny, so deployment is blocked.
✗
The VM is deployed but flagged as non-compliant.
Why it's wrong here
Deny effect blocks deployment entirely.
✓
The deployment is denied.
Why this is correct
The policy denies any VM SKU that is not Standard_D2s_v3.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates confuse the 'deny' effect with 'audit' or 'disabled', assuming the policy only logs non-compliance or allows deployment with a flag, when in fact 'deny' actively blocks the resource creation.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Azure Policy's 'deny' effect uses a deny action within Azure Resource Manager's role-based access control (RBAC) evaluation pipeline, intercepting the PUT request before the resource provider processes it. This means the policy is evaluated at deployment time, not after, ensuring non-compliant resources are never provisioned. In contrast, 'audit' and 'disabled' effects allow deployment but log or ignore non-compliance, respectively.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.
Related glossary terms
Concepts from this question explained
These glossary pages explain the core terms tested in this AZ-305 question in full detail.
Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions — This question tests Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: The deployment is denied. — The Azure Policy in the exhibit uses a 'deny' effect, which explicitly blocks any deployment that does not match the allowed VM SKUs. Since Standard_DS2_v2 is not in the allowed list, the policy engine evaluates the request during deployment and rejects it before any resource is created. This results in the deployment being denied entirely, not just audited or flagged.
What should I do if I get this AZ-305 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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