10-15% of exam
Monitor and Maintain Azure Resources
Use Azure Monitor and Log Analytics to track resource health, configure backup and recovery, and manage cost.
Manage Azure Identities and GovernanceImplement and Manage StorageDeploy and Manage Azure Compute ResourcesImplement and Manage Virtual NetworkingMonitor and Maintain Azure Resources
Azure Monitor, metrics, and Log Analytics
Azure Monitor is the platform-wide service collecting metrics and logs from virtually every Azure resource, and is the foundation for alerting and diagnostics.
Data types
- Metrics: lightweight, numeric, time-series data (for example, CPU percentage) collected automatically at a set interval, well suited to fast alerting.
- Logs: structured records (for example, activity logs, diagnostic logs) stored in a Log Analytics workspace and queried with Kusto Query Language (KQL).
Key components
- Diagnostic settings: configured per resource to send its logs and metrics to a Log Analytics workspace, storage account, or event hub.
- Log Analytics workspace: the queryable store for collected log data; one workspace can receive data from many resources and subscriptions.
- Alert rules: evaluate a metric or log query on a schedule and trigger an action group (email, SMS, webhook, or automation) when a condition is met.
Common confusion
- Metrics-based alerts react faster and cost less than log-based alerts, but log queries can express far more complex conditions across combined data sources.
Backup and disaster recovery
Redundancy protects against infrastructure failure; it does not protect against accidental deletion, corruption, or a ransomware event. Backup and recovery are separate, deliberate configurations.
Azure Backup
- Backs up VMs, files, folders, and certain PaaS workloads (like SQL in a VM) to a Recovery Services vault.
- Backup policies define frequency (for example, daily) and retention (how long each recovery point is kept).
- Recovery points allow restoring an entire VM, individual files, or in some cases just specific disks.
Azure Site Recovery (ASR)
- Replicates entire VMs to a secondary region so they can be failed over and started there if the primary region becomes unavailable.
- Distinct from backup: ASR is about keeping a workload running elsewhere during an outage, not preserving historical recovery points.
Common confusion
- Backup answers "can I get an earlier version of this back?" Site Recovery answers "can this workload keep running if the region goes down?" A complete resiliency plan typically needs both.
Cost management and resource optimization
Administering Azure includes keeping spend visible and predictable, not just keeping resources running.
Cost visibility
- Cost Management + Billing shows spend broken down by subscription, resource group, service, or tag, and can forecast based on current trends.
- Budgets can be set at a subscription or resource group scope, with alerts triggered as actual or forecasted spend approaches a threshold.
Optimization levers
- Azure Advisor surfaces recommendations across cost, reliability, security, and performance, such as resizing an underutilized VM or deleting an unattached disk.
- Reserved Instances and Savings Plans commit to usage over one or three years in exchange for a significant discount versus pay-as-you-go pricing.
- Azure Hybrid Benefit lets an organization apply existing on-premises Windows Server or SQL Server licenses to Azure VMs, reducing the compute cost.
Common confusion
- Reservations discount compute capacity regardless of what's deployed against it; Azure Hybrid Benefit discounts the licensing cost specifically — they address different parts of the bill and are often combined.