AZ-305 Practice Question: Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions
Your organization uses Azure Monitor to collect metrics from Azure resources. You need to create a custom metric alert that triggers when the average CPU usage of a specific virtual machine exceeds 80% for 10 minutes. Which TWO components are required? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse the required components for creating an alert (the rule and the action group) with optional components like diagnostic settings or runbooks, which are only needed for advanced scenarios or log-based alerts.
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
✓
Metric alert rule
A metric alert rule is required because it defines the condition (average CPU > 80%) and the evaluation frequency (every 1 minute over a 10-minute aggregation window) that triggers the alert. Without the rule, Azure Monitor has no logic to evaluate the metric data and fire the alert.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Metric alert rule
Why this is correct
This is the core resource that continuously evaluates a specified metric (e.g., percentage CPU) against a threshold (e.g., >80%) over a given aggregation window (e.g., 5 minutes). It defines the target resource, metric name, operator, threshold, and evaluation frequency, and it triggers a state change when the condition is met. Without a metric alert rule, no alert is generated from the metric stream.
- ✗
Automation runbook
Why it's wrong here
While an action group can include an Automation runbook as a notification/action to remediate issues, the runbook is not a component of the alerting pipeline itself. The alert rule fires and references the action group, which may invoke the runbook, but the runbook is optional and not required for alert generation or email notifications. Its absence does not prevent the metric alert from being created or firing.
- ✓
Action group
Why this is correct
An action group is a collection of notification preferences (email, SMS, webhook, ITSM, etc.) that is linked to a metric alert rule. When the alert rule's condition is met, it triggers the associated action group(s) to send notifications. The action group is necessary to deliver the alert to users, but it is separate from the rule—it does not define the metric, threshold, or evaluation logic.
- ✗
Log Analytics workspace
Why it's wrong here
Metrics collected by Azure Monitor are stored in the Azure Monitor Metrics database (a time-series store), not in Log Analytics (which stores log data). Metric alerts can query these metrics directly without any Log Analytics dependency. Log Analytics is used for log-based alerts or for queries against log data, so it's not relevant for a standard metric alert rule.
- ✗
Diagnostic setting
Why it's wrong here
Diagnostic settings control the export of platform metrics and logs to destinations like storage, Event Hubs, or Log Analytics. They are not required for a metric alert rule to evaluate metrics already collected by Azure Monitor's platform metric collection. The alert rule reads from the platform metric store; diagnostic settings are only needed if you want to route those metrics elsewhere for retention or additional analytics.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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