AZ-305 Practice Question: Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions
You are designing a monitoring solution for Azure SQL Database. The requirement is to track query performance metrics such as CPU usage, data IO, and wait statistics over time. You need to identify performance bottlenecks and provide historical data for analysis. Which Azure service should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure SQL Analytics (a broader monitoring solution) with Query Performance Insight (a focused query-level tool), or they assume Azure Monitor Metrics provides query-level details when it only offers aggregate resource metrics.
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
✓
Query Performance Insight for Azure SQL Database
Query Performance Insight for Azure SQL Database is the correct choice because it provides built-in, intelligent analysis of top queries by CPU, data IO, and wait statistics over time, enabling you to identify performance bottlenecks and review historical data. It is specifically designed for Azure SQL Database and offers a customizable time range for trend analysis, directly meeting the requirement to track query performance metrics and analyze historical data.
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 Metrics for Azure SQL Database
Why it's wrong here
Azure Monitor Metrics for Azure SQL Database stores only numeric performance counters (e.g., DTU/CPU usage, storage IO) at a fixed aggregation granularity, making it unsuitable for analyzing query-level behavior such as execution counts, duration, or per-query wait types. These metrics are rolled up across the entire database or elastic pool, so they cannot identify which specific query is causing a bottleneck, whereas the required solution must expose per-query details.
- ✗
Azure SQL Analytics (preview) in Azure Monitor
Why it's wrong here
Azure SQL Analytics (preview) in Azure Monitor is a monitoring solution that ingests diagnostic logs and metrics into a Log Analytics workspace, enabling cross-resource queries and custom alerting. While it does include some query-related data, it requires enabling diagnostic settings and relies on log-based aggregation, making it more indirect and less focused than the built-in Query Performance Insight, which offers immediate, dedicated query-level performance information directly from the SQL Database blade.
- ✗
Azure SQL Database Intelligent Insights
Why it's wrong here
Azure SQL Database Intelligent Insights delivers proactive, AI-driven anomaly detection and root-cause analysis regarding overall database performance, such as resource contention or wait-time escalations. It does not provide a historical, per-query breakdown of runtime statistics like execution count, CPU time, duration, or logical reads for individual queries; instead, it surfaces high-level health summaries and alerts, making it inappropriate for retrieving detailed query metrics over time.
- ✓
Query Performance Insight for Azure SQL Database
Why this is correct
Query Performance Insight for Azure SQL Database is the correct choice because it is the native Azure portal feature designed specifically to surface query-level performance data, including execution count, CPU time, duration, and logical reads per query over a customizable time window. It also displays wait statistics tied to query tuning recommendations, allowing you to pinpoint poorly performing SQL statements and observe their historical trends without requiring additional configuration beyond the database's query store.
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