AZ-305 Practice Question: Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions
Your organization has multiple Azure subscriptions. You need to create a central view of policy compliance across all subscriptions. What should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Azure Policy compliance dashboard with Azure Monitor or Azure Resource Graph, thinking either can serve as a central compliance viewer, but only the Policy dashboard provides the out-of-the-box aggregated view across subscriptions without requiring custom queries or workbooks.
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 Policy compliance dashboard
The Azure Policy compliance dashboard provides a centralized view of policy compliance across all subscriptions in a management group or tenant. It aggregates compliance data from all assigned policies and initiatives, allowing you to filter by subscription, policy definition, or compliance state. This is the native tool designed specifically for cross-subscription policy compliance monitoring.
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
Why it's wrong here
Azure Monitor is designed for collecting platform metrics, activity logs, and resource telemetry, then generating alerts and visualizations about operational health and performance. While a custom workbook could import policy compliance data, Azure Monitor does not natively evaluate resource compliance against Azure Policy definitions across subscriptions. The built-in compliance page for that purpose lives in Azure Policy, not in Azure Monitor.
- ✓
Azure Policy compliance dashboard
Why this is correct
The Azure Policy compliance dashboard is the native portal surface in Azure Policy that aggregates compliance states for all policies, initiatives, and assignments, and it can scope the view to a management group, subscription, or resource group. It uses the policy evaluation pipeline to mark resources as compliant or noncompliant against definitions, then shows rollups and drill-downs so administrators can identify offending resources and exemptions. This precisely meets the need to see compliance across multiple subscriptions.
- ✗
Azure Resource Graph
Why it's wrong here
Azure Resource Graph is a query engine that lets you rapidly explore Azure resources and their properties across subscriptions using KQL, but it reports the current inventory and configuration of resources, not their policy compliance status. Although Resource Graph can be used to fetch policy state tables for custom queries, it does not provide a built-in compliance dashboard or calculate compliance rollups for policy assignments. Resource Graph answers 'what resources exist and how are they configured,' not 'how compliant are they with governance rules.'
- ✗
Azure Blueprints
Why it's wrong here
Azure Blueprints is an orchestration/deployment service that packages ARM templates, roles, and policy assignments into a single definable blueprint for deploying new environments consistently. A blueprint can assign policy definitions, but once deployed, Azure Blueprints does not maintain or display a compliance score or per-resource compliance view for those assignments. The ongoing compliance tracking and dashboard after deployment are handled by Azure Policy, not Blueprints.
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