AZ-900 Practice Question 39: Budget Alerts
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) · Test 4 · question 9 of 10
A finance team creates a $10,000 monthly budget on a subscription in Microsoft Cost Management, with an alert threshold at 90%. In the third week of the month, actual spending passes $10,000. What happens by default?
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Answer:
This is the single most useful thing to know about budgets, and it surprises people. A budget in Cost Management exists to plan for spending and to drive organizational accountability by proactively informing people. The documentation states it plainly: notifications are triggered when the budget thresholds are exceeded, "Resources aren't affected, and your consumption isn't stopped." A budget is a monitoring and alerting construct, not an enforcement one.
Options A, B, and C all describe enforcement that a budget simply does not perform, nothing is blocked, nothing is shut down, and no subscription is disabled. If you want a threshold to trigger real action, you attach an action group to the budget, which can run automation such as an Azure Function, a Logic App, or an Automation runbook that shuts resources down. That behaviour has to be built deliberately; it is never the default.
Reference: Tutorial: Create and manage Azure budgets