L14. Monitoring and Management: Azure Monitor, Advisor, and Service Health
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Azure Monitor, Advisor, and Service Health form the observability and management layer of Azure. The AZ-900 exam tests what each service does and when to use it.
Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor is the unified observability service for Azure. It collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry from Azure resources and on-premises infrastructure. Data sources:
- Metrics: numerical time-series data (CPU usage, request rate, error count)
- Logs: text-based records stored in Log Analytics workspaces; queried with KQL (Kusto Query Language)
- Activity Log: records control plane operations (who created or deleted a resource)
- Alerts: notify teams via email, SMS, or webhook when metrics or log queries exceed thresholds
- Dashboards: visualize metrics and logs in custom Azure dashboards
- Application Insights: application performance monitoring (APM) for web apps
- Log Analytics: centralized log aggregation and query workspace
Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that analyzes your resource configuration and usage and recommends improvements across five categories:
| Category | Focus |
|---|---|
| Cost | Identify idle or under-utilized resources |
| Security | Flag security gaps (also feeds Defender for Cloud) |
| Reliability | Improve availability and business continuity |
| Operational Excellence | Deployment best practices |
| Performance | Reduce latency and improve throughput |
Azure Service Health
Service Health provides personalized alerts and guidance about Azure service issues and planned maintenance that might affect your resources. Three components:
- Azure Status: global status of all Azure services at azure.status.microsoft
- Service Health: personalized view of Azure service health for the regions and services you use
- Resource Health: health status of your specific Azure resources
Azure Arc
Azure Arc extends Azure management to resources outside of Azure: on-premises servers, Kubernetes clusters, and databases in other clouds.
| Service | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Azure Monitor | Collect metrics, logs, and telemetry from all resources |
| Azure Advisor | Personalized recommendations across 5 pillars |
| Azure Service Health | Alerts for outages, planned maintenance, and advisories |
| Resource Health | Health status of individual resources |
- ✓Azure Monitor collects metrics and logs from Azure resources and on-premises infrastructure
- ✓Application Insights (part of Monitor) provides APM for web applications
- ✓Azure Advisor provides free personalized recommendations across Cost, Security, Reliability, Performance, and Operational Excellence
- ✓Azure Service Health alerts you to Azure service outages and planned maintenance affecting your regions and services
- ✓Resource Health shows the health status of your specific individual Azure resources
1. A team wants to receive notifications when Azure is experiencing an outage in the East US region that affects their Azure SQL Database. Which tool should they configure?
2. Which Azure service provides free, personalized recommendations to reduce costs by identifying idle virtual machines?
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This free course covers the theory. Pluralsight adds guided video paths, hands-on Azure labs, and timed practice exams to help you pass AZ-900 with confidence.