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AZ-400 · domain

Implement an instrumentation strategy

This domain covers configuring telemetry and monitoring for applications and infrastructure in Azure DevOps pipelines. It is tested through scenario questions on Application Insights setup, dependency and exception tracking, security group purposes, and instrumentation choices for App Service, containers, and on-premises workloads.

29 questions6 easy10 medium13 hard

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What this domain covers

What to know about Implement an instrumentation strategy

A candidate must configure Application Insights telemetry for App Service and other workloads, enable dependency and exception tracking, and interpret Azure Monitor data. The single most important thing is correctly wiring the Application Insights SDK or auto-instrumentation so all required telemetry is captured with minimal code changes.

Configuring Application Insights for Azure App Service with connection strings and SDK auto-instrumentation

Using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics workspaces, and Kusto Query Language for telemetry analysis

Implementing distributed tracing with correlation IDs across HTTP and dependency calls

Matching Azure DevOps security groups like Project Administrators to their permissions

Watch out for

Common Implement an instrumentation strategy exam traps

  • ▸Assuming Application Insights dependency tracking works automatically for all third-party calls without configuring the SDK or agents correctly.
  • ▸Confusing Azure DevOps security group purposes, such as Project Administrators versus Build Administrators, in permission-matching questions.
  • ▸Forgetting that connection strings are now preferred over instrumentation keys for Application Insights configuration.

Question index

All Implement an instrumentation strategy questions (29)

Click any question to see the full explanation, or start a practice session above.

1

A company deploys a web application to Azure App Service. They want to monitor application performance and detect anomalies using Application Insights. Which two components should be configured?

Medium
2

Which TWO metrics should you monitor to evaluate the reliability of a web application according to the DORA metrics?

Easy
3

A company deploys a .NET Core web application to Azure App Service. The application uses Application Insights for monitoring. The operations team reports that dependency tracking is missing for calls to a third-party REST API made using HttpClient. The application is instrumented with the Application Insights SDK. Which action should be taken to enable dependency tracking for HttpClient calls?

Medium
4

You are deploying a Java application to Azure App Service using Azure Pipelines. You want to automatically capture JVM metrics (heap usage, garbage collection) and correlate them with deployment events. What should you do?

Medium
5

You need to monitor the health of your Azure Pipeline agents. Which Azure DevOps Analytics view should you use to identify agents that have not reported in the last hour?

Easy
6

You are using Application Insights to monitor a web application. You need to create an alert that triggers when the average server response time exceeds 2 seconds over a 5-minute window. You want to minimize false positives by requiring the condition to be met for at least two consecutive 5-minute periods. What should you configure?

Easy
7

A company uses Azure Monitor and Application Insights to monitor a microservices application deployed on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The development team wants to implement distributed tracing to correlate requests across services. They currently have Application Insights SDKs instrumented in each service. Which TWO configurations are required to enable end-to-end distributed tracing?

Hard
8

Refer to the exhibit. You deploy this ARM template to create a Log Analytics workspace and a saved search. After deployment, you notice that the saved search returns no results even though there are failed pipeline runs. What is the most likely reason?

Hard
9

Your organization uses Azure Pipelines with multiple release stages. You need to instrument the pipeline to capture the duration of each stage and the number of failed tasks. Which TWO approaches should you use?

Medium
10

You are debugging a production issue using Application Insights Snapshot Debugger. The exhibit shows a snapshot from a NullReferenceException. The variable _dbContext is null. What is the most likely root cause?

Hard
11

Drag and drop the steps to configure Azure DevOps artifact feeds for NuGet packages into the correct order.

Medium
12

You are troubleshooting an intermittent performance issue in a web application. Application Insights shows a high number of failed dependency calls to Azure SQL Database. The errors are SqlException with error code -2 (timeout). What is the most likely cause and recommended fix?

Hard
13

You have deployed an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template for a scheduled query rule as shown. The rule is enabled and targets an Application Insights resource. However, no alerts are firing despite HTTP 500 errors occurring. What is the most likely cause?

Medium
14

A development team is implementing a distributed tracing solution for a microservices application deployed on Azure. They want to correlate requests across services using OpenTelemetry and send data to Azure Monitor. The application currently generates traces, but the traces are incomplete, showing only individual service spans without end-to-end correlation. The team has already instrumented each service with the OpenTelemetry SDK. What should the team do to ensure proper end-to-end trace correlation?

Hard
15

You are the DevOps lead for a fintech company. The organization uses a multi-tenant Azure DevOps environment with hundreds of pipelines. The compliance team requires that every pipeline run must be auditable with the following attributes captured: who triggered the run, what code changes were included, which artifacts were produced, and whether any secrets (e.g., Azure Key Vault references) were accessed during the run. Additionally, all audit data must be retained for 7 years and be queryable within 5 minutes of a pipeline completion. Current state: pipelines use Azure Key Vault for secrets, and YAML pipelines are defined with variables referencing Key Vault. You need to design an instrumentation strategy to meet these requirements. What should you do?

Hard
16

You are building a comprehensive instrumentation strategy for a large-scale Azure DevOps environment. You need to ensure that all pipeline events (build, release, test) are automatically tracked and correlated with application performance data. Which THREE components should you include?

Hard
17

You are reviewing a Data Collection Rule (DCR) for an Azure virtual machine. The DCR is assigned to the VM, and the Azure Monitor Agent is installed. After one hour, no performance data appears in the Log Analytics workspace. What is the most likely cause?

Hard
18

You are designing a centralized logging strategy for multiple microservices hosted in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Each microservice writes logs in JSON format to stdout/stderr. The operations team needs to query logs across all services and correlate them with application performance metrics. Which solution provides the best integration?

Hard
19

You are designing an instrumentation strategy for a new application that will be deployed to Azure. The application consists of an Azure App Service web front end, an Azure Functions backend, and an Azure SQL Database. You need to collect telemetry that allows you to correlate requests across all components and analyze performance bottlenecks. You plan to use Application Insights. Which two actions should you perform? (Choose two.)

Medium
20

Your team uses Azure DevOps for CI/CD. You need to ensure that every build publishes telemetry to Application Insights, including build duration, test pass rate, and deployment frequency. Which approach should you use?

Medium
21

You are designing an instrumentation strategy for a microservices application deployed to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using Azure Pipelines. The application emits custom metrics using OpenTelemetry. You need to ensure that all pipeline-related events (build, release, and test results) are correlated with application telemetry to enable end-to-end traceability. What should you do?

Hard
22

You are a DevOps engineer for a large e-commerce company. The company uses Azure DevOps for CI/CD and Application Insights for monitoring. The application is a .NET Core 6 microservice running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with a Redis cache and Azure SQL Database. Recently, the operations team noticed that the application's response time has degraded significantly during peak traffic hours. Application Insights shows an increase in server-side dependency call duration to Redis and SQL, but no increase in exceptions. The team suspects a connection pooling issue. You have been asked to diagnose and fix the problem. Which approach should you take first?

Hard
23

Which TWO are best practices when configuring alerts in Azure Monitor for a production application?

Easy
24

Your team uses Azure Pipelines to deploy a Node.js application. Recently, deployments have been failing intermittently due to a missing npm package. The pipeline runs successfully on the local agent but fails on the hosted agent. Which instrumentation strategy should you implement to identify the root cause?

Medium
25

You manage an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster that runs a microservices application. You have enabled Azure Monitor for containers and configured Application Insights for the services. The development team reports that they cannot see the dependency calls between microservices in the Application Insights Application Map. You need to ensure that the Application Map shows the dependencies between the microservices. What should you do?

Hard
26

You are configuring Application Insights for a .NET Core web application deployed to Azure App Service. The application must capture telemetry for all HTTP requests, exceptions, and dependency calls with minimal code changes. What should you do?

Easy
27

Match each Azure DevOps security concept to its purpose.

Medium
28

Your team uses GitHub Actions for CI/CD. You need to collect and analyze build and deployment logs centrally to identify recurring failures. Which service should you use to ingest and query these logs?

Easy
29

A company has a multi-region application deployed on Azure App Service (Windows) across three regions: West US, East US, and West Europe. The operations team uses Azure Monitor to collect application logs and metrics. Recently, they noticed that the application in West US is experiencing high CPU usage (sustained above 90%) during peak hours, while the other regions remain below 60%. The team has set up an autoscale rule on the App Service plan to scale out when CPU exceeds 80% for 10 minutes. However, autoscale is not triggering, and the application in West US is becoming slow. The team has verified that the autoscale rule is correctly configured, the instance count is below the maximum, and there are no scale-in rules interfering. The metric data appears in Azure Monitor. You suspect that the metric alert that triggers autoscale is not firing. What is the most likely cause?

Hard

Frequently asked questions

What does the Implement an instrumentation strategy domain cover on the AZ-400 exam?
A candidate must configure Application Insights telemetry for App Service and other workloads, enable dependency and exception tracking, and interpret Azure Monitor data. The single most important thing is correctly wiring the Application Insights SDK or auto-instrumentation so all required telemetry is captured with minimal code changes.
How many questions are in this domain?
This page lists all 29 Implement an instrumentation strategy questions in the AZ-400 question bank. The actual exam draws from this domain proportionally to its weighting in the official exam blueprint.
What is the best way to practise this domain?
Start with a short focused session (10 questions) to identify gaps, then work through explanations. Repeat with a longer session once the weak areas feel solid.
Can I practise only Implement an instrumentation strategy questions?
Yes — the session launcher on this page filters questions to this domain only. Choose any session length for inline explanations and scoring.
az-400 AZ-400 instrumentation strategy Practice Questions