AZ-900 Describe Azure management and governance Practice Question
Which Azure monitoring capability sends automated alerts when resource metrics exceed defined thresholds?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Azure Monitor Alerts (which reacts to your resource metrics) with Azure Service Health (which reports on Azure platform health), or they mistakenly think Azure Advisor's recommendations include real-time threshold-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
✓
Azure Monitor Alerts
Azure Monitor Alerts is the correct capability because it proactively notifies you when metrics (e.g., CPU percentage, disk I/O) from Azure resources cross user-defined thresholds. It works by evaluating log search queries or metric signals at a specified frequency and triggering actions (email, SMS, webhook) when conditions are met. This is the core monitoring and alerting service in Azure, not a recommendation or health dashboard.
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 Advisor
Why it's wrong here
Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that evaluates your subscriptions against best practices for cost, security, reliability, and performance. It produces recommendations for optimizing configurations but does not monitor live metrics against user-defined thresholds. When a condition is met, Advisor does not actively send real-time notifications; it merely displays advisory guidance. Therefore it is not the service used for metric-based alerting.
- ✗
Azure Service Health
Why it's wrong here
Azure Service Health provides a personalized dashboard of platform events, including service incidents, planned maintenance, and regional health advisories across Azure regions. It alerts you to issues that affect the overall availability of Azure services, but it does not evaluate performance metrics of your individual virtual machines or applications. Because it is not tied to your resource-level metric thresholds, it cannot satisfy the requirement to notify when a specific workload condition is exceeded. Thus it is the wrong service for this scenario.
- ✓
Azure Monitor Alerts
Why this is correct
Azure Monitor Alerts is the correct service because it systematically evaluates resource metrics (such as CPU usage, memory, or custom app metrics) against defined threshold conditions on a set schedule. When the condition is true, it activates an action group that sends notifications or runs automation. This provides proactive, real-time alerting for performance and health of your individual Azure resources. It directly matches the requirement to notify when a resource metric crosses a threshold.
- ✗
Azure Policy
Why it's wrong here
Azure Policy is a governance tool that enforces and evaluates organizational standards for resource configuration, such as required tags, allowed locations, and allowed resource types. It continuously assesses compliance and can apply denials or remediation actions on non-compliant resources, but it does not process performance-based metric thresholds like CPU utilization. No alert is generated from Azure Policy when a metric exceeds a value; it only acts on configuration compliance. Hence it is not the correct choice for metric threshold notifications.
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Key term
User
A user is any person, system, or device that interacts with an IT service, resource, or identity system, typically authenticated through credentials and authorized to perform specific actions.
Key term
Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor is a cloud service that collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry data from your Azure and on-premises resources to help you understand performance and availability.
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