AZ-305 Practice Question: Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions
You are designing a monitoring solution for a multi-region application deployed on Azure Virtual Machines and Azure SQL Database. The solution must provide a unified view of metrics and logs from all resources, detect anomalies using machine learning, and send alerts to the operations team. Which TWO capabilities should you include in the design?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Azure Log Analytics as a separate monitoring service rather than recognizing it as a component of Azure Monitor, leading them to select it as an independent capability instead of Azure Monitor itself.
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 Application Insights
Azure Monitor is the core platform for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from Azure resources, including metrics and logs from VMs and SQL Database. Application Insights extends Azure Monitor with application performance management (APM) and built-in machine learning anomaly detection (e.g., Smart Detection) for proactive alerting. Together, they provide a unified monitoring view with ML-driven insights.
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 is a global service that reports on the status of Azure infrastructure and services, including regional outages, planned maintenance, and health advisories. It is designed to help you track Azure platform health, not the health or performance of your own application. For application-level metrics, logs, and anomaly detection, you need a telemetry solution like Application Insights, which instruments your code rather than the Azure platform.
- ✓
Azure Application Insights
Why this is correct
Azure Application Insights is a feature of Azure Monitor and a full-fledged Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers. It automatically collects request rates, response times, dependency calls, exceptions, and custom events, and it uses smart detection to flag anomalies without you having to define thresholds. It also provides distributed tracing and a rich query language, making it the definitive choice for application-specific monitoring.
- ✗
Azure Security Center
Why it's wrong here
Azure Security Center (now Microsoft Defender for Cloud) is a security management and threat-protection service that assesses vulnerabilities, enforces security policies, and generates security recommendations across hybrid cloud workloads. It monitors for security misconfigurations and suspicious activity, but it does not provide application performance metrics, custom telemetry, or operational analytics. Therefore, it is not appropriate for monitoring application health and performance.
- ✓
Azure Monitor
Why this is correct
Azure Monitor is the central hub that collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry from Azure resources, virtual machines, and on-premises environments. It provides a unified pipeline for platform metrics, activity logs, and diagnostic logs, along with alerting and visualization through dashboards and workbooks. Because it serves as the foundation for all monitoring services in Azure, it is a correct choice for a broad monitoring solution, especially when paired with Application Insights for deep app-level data.
- ✗
Azure Log Analytics
Why it's wrong here
Azure Log Analytics is not a standalone service but rather the workspace and query environment within Azure Monitor where log data is stored and searched using the Kusto Query Language (KQL). It allows you to aggregate, correlate, and visualize logs from multiple sources, but it requires you to send data to an Application Insights or Azure Monitor resource first. It cannot independently collect application telemetry or perform anomaly detection, so it is not a complete monitoring solution by itself.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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