AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam

Describe the purpose of Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor is a free, built-in service that scans your Azure environment and gives personalized recommendations to improve your workloads. It looks at four areas: reliability, security, performance, and cost. Advisor compares your resource configuration against best practices and then suggests actions you can take, such as moving an underused virtual machine to a smaller size to save money or enabling geo-redundant storage for better disaster recovery. You can view the recommendations in the Azure portal and either apply them directly or dismiss items that do not apply. Advisor helps you stay proactive so you can avoid problems before they happen and get the most value from your Azure subscription.

Describe Azure Service Health

Azure Service Health keeps you informed about the health of Azure services and the resources you use. It combines three separate views: Azure Status gives a global view of all Azure services across all regions; Service Health focuses on events that affect your subscription, such as an ongoing outage or planned maintenance; and Resource Health reports the health of your individual resources, like a specific virtual machine or database. When an issue occurs, Service Health provides alerts, root-cause explanations, and steps to restore service. You can set up custom alerts so that you are notified by email or text message when a service problem or planned change could affect your resources. This tool helps you distinguish between a problem on your side and an issue that Azure is already fixing.

Describe Azure Monitor, including Log Analytics, Azure Monitor alerts, and Application Insights

Azure Monitor is the central platform for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your Azure resources and even from on-premises applications. It collects metrics (numeric data like CPU usage) and logs (text-based event records) from services and virtual machines. Log Analytics is the tool inside Azure Monitor that lets you run queries against all that log data using a special query language called Kusto Query Language (KQL). You can build dashboards and pin results to share insights with your team. Azure Monitor alerts automatically notify you when conditions you define are met, such as when a virtual machine’s CPU goes above 90% for five minutes. Alerts can trigger actions like sending an email, running an Azure Function, or starting an automation runbook. Application Insights is a feature of Azure Monitor designed for application performance monitoring – it tracks web application requests, failures, dependencies, and user behavior. It gives you a detailed view of how your code is performing and helps you find the root cause of slowdowns or errors. Together, these components let you see the health and performance of both your infrastructure and your applications in one place.