AZ-305 Practice Question: Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions
Which THREE Azure services or features should you use to design a comprehensive monitoring solution for a hybrid infrastructure spanning on-premises and Azure?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Network Watcher (a network diagnostics tool) with a general monitoring solution, or they overlook Azure Arc-enabled servers as a prerequisite for managing and monitoring on-premises machines with Azure Monitor.
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 central platform for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from both Azure and on-premises resources. It provides a unified monitoring experience by aggregating metrics and logs, enabling alerting, dashboards, and integration with other services like Log Analytics. For a hybrid infrastructure, Azure Monitor serves as the core data ingestion and analysis hub, making it essential for a comprehensive monitoring solution.
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 correct choice because it is the central platform for telemetry collection, analysis, and alerting across Azure and on-premises workloads. It ingests metrics and logs into a unified data plane, supports log queries with KQL, and provides dashboards, alerts, and integration with Log Analytics workspaces and Application Insights. This makes it the foundational service for any hybrid monitoring architecture.
- ✗
Network Watcher
Why it's wrong here
Network Watcher is not suitable because its capabilities are scoped exclusively to Azure virtual networks. It offers network diagnostics such as IP flow verify, connection monitor, and NSG flow logs, but these cannot capture OS-level metrics, application logs, or data from on-premises servers. Since it has no agent for on-premises deployment and cannot reach outside the Azure network fabric, it cannot contribute to a hybrid server monitoring solution.
- ✓
Log Analytics agent (or Azure Monitor Agent)
Why this is correct
The Log Analytics agent (now largely replaced by the Azure Monitor Agent) is required for collecting data from the operating systems of on-premises and Azure VMs. It sends performance counters, event logs, syslog, and custom files to a Log Analytics workspace, where the data becomes queryable in Azure Monitor. This agent is the ingestion path that makes server telemetry from outside Azure available for alerting and analysis.
- ✓
Azure Arc-enabled servers
Why this is correct
Azure Arc-enabled servers are correct because they bring on-premises and multicloud machines into Azure Resource Manager, giving them ARM resource IDs and enabling consistent governance, policy, and inventory management. For monitoring specifically, Arc simplifies the deployment of the Azure Monitor Agent and the configuration of data collection rules, ensuring that hybrid servers are managed and observed exactly like cloud-native VMs.
- ✗
Azure Traffic Manager
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer, not a monitoring or telemetry service. It routes user traffic to healthy endpoints based on routing methods like performance, priority, or geographic, but it does not collect metrics or logs from servers and has no agent or data ingestion capability. Therefore, it is irrelevant to a scenario that requires collecting and analyzing operational data from on-premises infrastructure.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
One of 795 original AZ-305 practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.