AZ-305 Practice Question: Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions
You need to monitor the performance and health of your Azure virtual machines, including custom metrics and logs. You also need to set up alerts based on specific thresholds. Which Azure service should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Log Analytics (a data store and query tool) with Azure Monitor (the full monitoring and alerting platform), leading them to select Option C when Azure Monitor is the correct overarching service that includes Log Analytics and alerting capabilities.
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 correct choice because it provides a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from Azure virtual machines, including custom metrics and logs. It integrates with the Azure Monitor Agent to gather performance counters and event logs, and supports metric alerts and log alerts based on specific thresholds, directly meeting all stated requirements.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Application Insights
Why it's wrong here
Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service within Azure Monitor that requires instrumenting your application with an SDK. It tracks request rates, response times, failure statistics, and custom dependencies, but it does not collect guest-level infrastructure metrics such as CPU utilization or disk health from Azure VMs. For raw infrastructure performance, you need the platform metrics and agents administered by Azure Monitor itself, not Application Insights.
- ✗
Azure Service Health
Why it's wrong here
Azure Service Health provides a personalized view of the status of Azure services and regions your subscriptions depend on, including ongoing incidents, planned maintenance, and health advisories. It focuses on the health of the Azure cloud platform itself, not on the performance or configuration of your deployed resources. For monitoring a VM's CPU, memory, and uptime, Service Health is irrelevant because those signals come from resource-level monitoring, not platform status notifications.
- ✗
Log Analytics
Why it's wrong here
Log Analytics is the data repository and query engine within Azure Monitor, used to store and query logs and metrics using KQL, but it is not the monitoring service itself. It requires data to be collected and routed to a Log Analytics workspace by Azure Monitor's collection mechanisms. While you might see performance data in Log Analytics, the actual monitoring, alerting, and visualization pipeline of metrics and logs is governed by Azure Monitor as the overarching platform.
- ✓
Azure Monitor
Why this is correct
Azure Monitor is the correct answer because it is the comprehensive monitoring service that collects, analyzes, and responds to telemetry from Azure, on-premises, and hybrid resources, including compute capacity and health. It includes metric-based monitoring, guest-level performance counters through agents, resource health, activity logs, and alerting—all with native integration to dashboards and workbooks. For VMs, VM Insights (which relies on Log Analytics) extends this capability, while the platform itself remains Azure Monitor.
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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.