Azure AZ-104: Monitor and maintain Azure resources Practice Questions

Setting the backup policy daily retention to 90 days directly satisfies requirement 1. Enabling soft delete on the vault with a 14-day retention period ensures that even if the vault or backup items are accidentally deleted, the backup data is retained for 14 days and can be recovered — satisfying requirement 2. Configuring geo-redundant storage (GRS) for the vault replicates backup data to the paired Azure secondary region, satisfying requirement 3. Cross Region Restore is an additional feature that enables restoring VMs from the secondary region, but it is not required to simply replicate data there — GRS already handles replication; Cross Region Restore is the access mechanism, not the replication mechanism, and is not one of the three stated requirements. Weekly retention of 14 weeks is not required by the scenario. LRS would keep data in only one region and would not meet requirement 3.

The backup policy retains daily recovery points for 30 days. On day 40, the oldest 10 daily recovery points (days 1–10) will have aged out and been automatically pruned by the vault according to the policy. Only the 30 most recent daily recovery points (days 11–40) will remain. Azure Backup automatically expires recovery points that exceed the configured retention range, so 40 recovery points would only exist if there were no retention limit. 12 recovery points would correspond to 12 weeks of weekly recovery points, not daily ones. 7 recovery points would be a weekly cycle, which does not apply to daily retention configured for 30 days.

Alert processing rules with the 'Suppression' action are specifically designed to suppress notifications during maintenance windows without modifying or disabling the underlying alert rules. The suppression can be scoped and scheduled to apply only during the defined window. Adding an empty action group would not suppress notifications from existing action groups already attached to alert rules — those would still fire. Routing notifications to a maintenance mailbox does not suppress them; it just redirects them, which does not meet the requirement. 'Remove action groups' is a valid alert processing rule action type in Azure Monitor that would achieve suppression, but 'Suppression' is the canonical and most straightforward action type purpose-built for this scenario and is the option explicitly described in Microsoft documentation for maintenance window suppression.

Azure Monitor log search alert rules evaluate on the configured frequency (every 5 minutes in this case). Once the condition is no longer met at the next evaluation cycle, the alert automatically transitions to a 'Resolved' state. The condition cleared at 14:05 UTC. The next evaluation runs at 14:10 UTC, where the query returns 0 records (not exceeding the threshold of 10), so the alert resolves at 14:10 UTC. The alert does not resolve immediately at 14:05 because the evaluation engine runs on a schedule (every 5 minutes) — it does not continuously poll. Waiting for a full 15-minute aggregation window or two evaluation cycles is not required for auto-resolution; only the next scheduled evaluation needs to show the threshold is no longer breached.

Azure Monitor Metrics explorer allows administrators to view platform metrics such as CPU percentage for a VM directly in the Azure portal without writing any queries, making it the simplest and most direct method. Log Analytics workspace with KQL requires writing queries and relies on data being sent to the workspace via diagnostic settings, which is not the simplest approach. Azure Monitor Workbooks are powerful visualization tools but require setup and configuration, and are not the most direct method for a quick check. Application Insights Live Metrics is designed for application-level telemetry from instrumented code, not for infrastructure-level VM metrics.