AZ-305 Practice Question: Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions
Your Azure subscription contains multiple virtual machines (VMs) that run a line-of-business application. You need to configure alerts when the CPU usage exceeds 90% for more than 5 minutes. Additionally, the alert must automatically trigger a runbook to scale out the application. Which Azure service should you use to create this alert?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Azure Monitor metric alerts with Azure Autoscale, assuming Autoscale can both alert and trigger runbooks, when in fact Autoscale only performs scaling actions based on its own rules and does not generate alerts or invoke runbooks.
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 metric alert
Azure Monitor metric alerts can evaluate resource metrics like CPU usage at a specified frequency and trigger actions when a threshold (e.g., 90%) is breached for a given duration (e.g., 5 minutes). The alert can invoke an Automation runbook via an action group, enabling automatic scaling of the application. This is the correct service because it directly supports metric-based alerting with multi-condition evaluation and action group integration.
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 Automation
Why it's wrong here
Azure Automation is a process automation and configuration management service that executes PowerShell or Python runbooks, but it has no native monitoring pipeline to sample VM metrics or create alert rules. While an Azure Monitor action group can invoke an Automation runbook when an alert fires, Automation itself cannot originate the alert; it is only a downstream execution target.
- ✗
Azure Logic Apps
Why it's wrong here
Azure Logic Apps is an integration and workflow service that can respond to an HTTP webhook or an alert payload, but it lacks the built-in metric query engine needed to evaluate VM performance counters over time. The alert rule itself must live in Azure Monitor; Logic Apps can be configured as an action in an action group, not as the service that defines the metric threshold and alert condition.
- ✓
Azure Monitor metric alert
Why this is correct
An Azure Monitor metric alert continuously evaluates one or more VM metrics—such as CPU percentage, memory pressure, or disk IOPS—against a defined threshold and firing condition. When the alert fires, its action group can contain an Automation runbook, webhook, or ITSM ticket, so this is the appropriate service to trigger custom remediation on the VMs.
- ✗
Azure Autoscale
Why it's wrong here
Azure Autoscale is specifically designed to add or remove instances of a Virtual Machine Scale Set or App Service Plan based on scheduled or metric criteria; its only effect is changing capacity. Even though it reacts to metrics, it cannot execute arbitrary Automation runbooks or custom scripts on individual VMs—notifications from Autoscale are limited to sending email or webhook messages about scaling operations.
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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.