AZ-104 Practice Question 19: Alert Rule No Notification
Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) · Test 2 · question 9 of 10
You create a metric alert rule that fires when average CPU on a production VM exceeds 90% for five minutes. Overnight the VM is pinned at 99%, and the next morning the Alerts page in Azure Monitor shows the alert with a state of *Fired*.
Nobody on the on-call rota received an email or an SMS. The alert rule is enabled and its condition clearly evaluated correctly. What should you do?
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Answer:
An alert rule decides *when* to fire; an action group decides *who is told and what happens next*. Action groups are "collections of notification preferences and automated actions" that you attach to an alert, and they "define who gets notified and what actions are taken when an alert fires." Notification types include email, SMS, voice, and Azure app push. A rule with no action group attached still evaluates its condition and still shows as fired in the portal; it simply has nowhere to send anything, which matches the symptom exactly. One action group can be reused by many rules.
Option A changes only how often the condition is evaluated. The alert already fired on time; firing faster still notifies nobody.
Option C is unnecessary for this alert and would not deliver notifications. Platform metrics such as CPU are collected automatically and are already what the metric alert evaluated; routing them to a workspace is for log queries and retention.
Option D addresses guest-level data. The Azure Monitor Agent is needed for in-guest counters such as free disk space or memory on some platforms, not for host CPU, and, like option C, it is about collecting data, not about notifying people.