AZ-305 Practice Question: Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions
You need to design a solution to monitor the performance of an Azure SQL Database. You want to create a dashboard that shows the top 10 queries by CPU usage over the last hour. What should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Azure SQL Analytics (a dedicated monitoring solution) with Log Analytics (the underlying data platform) or Azure Monitor Workbooks (a general-purpose dashboard tool), assuming any of them can provide the same pre-built top queries view without additional effort.
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 SQL Analytics
Azure SQL Analytics is a dedicated monitoring solution for Azure SQL Database that provides built-in views and dashboards for top queries by CPU, duration, and other performance metrics. It leverages the Query Store and DMVs to surface the top 10 queries by CPU usage over the last hour without requiring custom queries or additional configuration.
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 Workbooks
Why it's wrong here
Azure Monitor Workbooks can be used to monitor Azure SQL Database, but they are a generic reporting canvas rather than a purpose-built SQL monitoring experience. You must manually author KQL queries, choose metrics, and lay out visualizations to approximate the prebuilt performance views, which adds setup overhead and ongoing maintenance. In a design for turnkey performance monitoring, Workbooks are too manual a solution compared with a dedicated SQL monitoring product.
- ✗
Power BI
Why it's wrong here
Power BI is an external business intelligence and reporting application, not an Azure service that consumes Azure SQL performance telemetry out of the box. To use it, you must build an export or streaming data pipeline to move metrics, wait statistics, and query performance data into Power BI, and then create your own semantic model and reports. This is neither native nor automatic, so it fails the requirement for an integrated Azure monitoring solution.
- ✓
Azure SQL Analytics
Why this is correct
Azure SQL Analytics is the correct choice because it is a cloud monitoring solution built specifically for Azure SQL Database, elastic pools, and managed instances. It connects to Azure Monitor to collect resource utilization, wait stats, deadlocks, and query performance data, then presents it through prebuilt dashboards that show DTU/CPU, storage, IO, and session trends. These dashboards are ready to use without manual configuration, giving immediate visibility into SQL performance.
- ✗
Log Analytics
Why it's wrong here
Log Analytics is a log management and query platform that stores diagnostic data from Azure resources and enables KQL queries, but it does not provide a ready-made, SQL-specific performance monitoring dashboard. An administrator would have to write and save queries, build charts, and create alerts from scratch to get the same views that Azure SQL Analytics delivers as a template. While it can be part of the underlying data store for monitoring, it is not itself a prebuilt performance monitoring solution.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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