AZ-104 Practice Question 32: Budget Does Not Stop Spend

A budget is a monitoring and notification control, not a brake: "Notifications are triggered when the budget thresholds are exceeded. Resources aren't affected, and your consumption isn't stopped." To turn a threshold into an action, Microsoft points at action groups: "when you create or edit a budget for a subscription or resource group scope, you can configure it to call an action group. The action group can perform various actions when your budget threshold is met", and an Automation runbook action is documented for exactly this, to "shut down resources when a certain threshold in the associated budget is met". Budgets are evaluated against cost data roughly every 24 hours, so this is a strong control, not an instant one, worth telling finance.

Option A states the opposite of the documented behaviour, and it is the single most common misconception about budgets.

Option B misdescribes the spending limit. It is a property of credit-based offers such as a free trial or a Visual Studio subscription, where it disables services when the included credit runs out. It is not an arbitrary figure you set, and it isn't available on an Enterprise Agreement subscription.

Option D asks Azure Policy to do something it cannot. Policy evaluates the properties of a resource request (SKUs, regions, tags) at deployment time. It has no visibility of accrued cost, so no condition can express "month-to-date spend exceeds £5,000".

Reference: Tutorial: Create and manage Azure budgets