Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) — All Questions

An Azure service-level agreement of 99.9% uptime permits roughly how much downtime per month?

• a.About 43 minutes✓
• b.About 3 days
• c.About 4 hours
• d.Zero minutes, since 99.9% means no downtime

A 99.9% monthly SLA allows roughly 43 minutes of downtime, while 99.99% allows only about 4 minutes. Understanding these figures helps set realistic availability expectations.

When you combine several Azure services in a single application, what typically happens to the overall (composite) SLA?

• a.It increases with each additional service
• b.It always stays fixed at exactly 100% no matter how many services are added
• c.It generally decreases as more services are chained together✓
• d.It becomes irrelevant once services are combined

Because each dependent service can independently fail, chaining them multiplies their individual SLAs, lowering the composite figure. Architects add redundancy to offset this effect.

If Azure fails to meet a service's SLA, what may a customer be entitled to receive?

• a.A full refund of all past invoices automatically
• b.Service credits applied to their bill✓
• c.Guaranteed prevention of all future outages
• d.Free physical servers

SLAs are financially backed by service credits, which compensate customers when uptime commitments are missed. Credits typically must be requested and scale with the shortfall.

What is generally true about Azure services that are still in preview?

• a.They always carry a stronger SLA than released services
• b.They are typically not covered by a service-level agreement✓
• c.They are only available to Microsoft employees
• d.They are firmly guaranteed to never change at all before their release

Preview features are provided for evaluation and usually lack SLA guarantees and full support. They may change or be removed before reaching general availability.

What does 'general availability' (GA) mean for an Azure service?

• a.It is a signal that the service will very soon be deprecated and retired from Azure entirely
• b.The service is available only to a small invited group
• c.The service is fully released, supported for production use, and backed by an SLA✓
• d.The service is free of charge forever

GA marks a service as production-ready with full support and SLA coverage. Organizations generally wait for GA before running critical workloads on a feature.

What characterizes an Azure feature that is in private preview?

• a.It carries the very highest availability SLA of any released Azure service
• b.It is available to a limited, invited set of customers for early testing✓
• c.It is open to every Azure customer without restriction
• d.It is fully supported for production workloads

Private preview limits access to selected customers who provide feedback before wider release. Such features are experimental and not intended for production.

What characterizes an Azure feature that is in public preview?

• a.It can never be changed or updated in any way before it finally reaches its release date
• b.It is open for any customer to try but is not recommended for production workloads✓
• c.It carries the same SLA as a GA service
• d.It is restricted to a handful of invited testers

Public preview lets all customers evaluate a feature, but without full SLA or support, so it is unsuitable for production. Feedback during this stage shapes the final release.

To increase the effective availability of a virtual machine workload, what can you do?

• a.Deleting all of the workload's backups in order to save on storage costs
• b.Remove all monitoring to lower overhead
• c.Deploy it across availability zones or run multiple instances✓
• d.Reduce it to a single instance in one datacenter

Spreading instances across availability zones or using multiple VMs raises the composite availability above a single instance's SLA. Redundancy is the primary way to exceed a single component's guarantee.

An Azure SLA provides a financially backed uptime commitment, but what does it NOT guarantee?

• a.That outages will never occur✓
• b.That credits are available if targets are missed
• c.That the commitment is measured over time
• d.That a defined uptime percentage is targeted

An SLA promises a target and compensation if it is missed, not that failures will never happen. Designing for resilience remains the customer's responsibility.

Achieving a higher overall availability than a single Azure service's SLA usually requires what?

• a.Applying more tags to the resource
• b.Turning off all diagnostic and activity logging on the resource
• c.Using a smaller virtual machine size
• d.Building redundancy across availability zones or regions✓

You raise availability by removing single points of failure through redundancy across zones or regions. This architectural effort, not configuration tweaks, drives higher composite SLAs.

How does Microsoft typically communicate that an Azure service or feature will be retired?

• a.By deleting it without any warning
• b.By changing the portal's color scheme
• c.Through advance notifications and published announcements✓
• d.Only quietly through the customer's regular monthly invoice

Microsoft provides advance notice of deprecations and retirements so customers can plan migrations. Staying aware of these announcements is part of managing the service lifecycle.

What should you expect from features that are in preview?

• a.They may change or be removed before reaching general availability✓
• b.They are permanently locked and can never be altered or updated again
• c.They are supported for mission-critical production use
• d.They always have a higher SLA than GA features

Preview features are still evolving, so their behavior, APIs, or availability can change before GA. This is why they are not recommended for production workloads.

What does a higher SLA percentage, such as 99.99% compared with 99.9%, indicate?

• a.More allowed downtime and lower availability
• b.That the service is still in private preview
• c.Less allowed downtime and therefore higher availability✓
• d.An automatically lower monthly subscription cost overall

Each additional nine reduces the permitted downtime substantially, so 99.99% is stricter than 99.9%. Higher targets usually demand more redundant, and costlier, designs.

Designing an architecture to achieve very high availability usually comes with what trade-off?

• a.Guaranteed lower cost than a single instance
• b.A reduction in the number of nines in the SLA
• c.Higher cost and greater complexity✓
• d.Complete elimination of all monitoring needs

Redundancy across zones or regions increases resource count and design complexity, which raises cost. Teams balance the value of extra availability against this added expense.

A single-instance Azure virtual machine using premium SSD disks is offered with an SLA of approximately what?

• a.About 99.9% availability✓
• b.About 50% availability
• c.Exactly 100% availability with no downtime
• d.No SLA at all under any configuration

A single VM with premium storage carries roughly a 99.9% SLA, whereas spreading VMs across availability zones raises the guarantee. The storage type and deployment topology both influence the committed figure.

You need daily Azure cost data delivered automatically to a storage account for external analysis. What should you configure?

• a.A ReadOnly role assignment placed on the subscription's monthly invoice records
• b.A scheduled export in Microsoft Cost Management✓
• c.A resource lock that freezes all further charges on the billing account permanently
• d.A Network Security Group rule that forwards the billing data outward to storage

Cost Management supports scheduled exports that push cost and usage data to a storage account on a recurring basis. This enables downstream reporting and integration with external analytics tools.

Which Microsoft Entra ID feature governs the ways users can prove their identity, such as the Authenticator app or a FIDO2 key?

• a.Authentication methods✓
• b.A network firewall that inspects all sign-in traffic before it reaches the directory
• c.A collection of resource locks that stop users from changing their own passwords
• d.A billing feature that charges the tenant a small fee per successful sign-in event

Authentication methods define how users verify identity, including passwords, the Authenticator app, FIDO2 keys, and Windows Hello. Administrators enable and manage these methods to support MFA and passwordless sign-in.

You want an alert to automatically trigger a webhook or Logic App when it fires. What must the alert reference?

• a.A Log Analytics workspace that permanently stores the notification templates used
• b.A resource lock configured to prevent the alert from ever being modified again
• c.A budget threshold defined in Microsoft Cost Management for the whole subscription
• d.An action group✓

An action group is the reusable set of notifications and automated actions (email, SMS, webhook, Logic App, function) that an alert invokes when it fires. Referencing one lets alerts drive automated responses.

Your organization must ensure new storage accounts are always created with a required 'CostCenter' tag. Which tool enforces this at creation time?

• a.An Azure Advisor recommendation that periodically suggests adding the missing tag
• b.Azure Policy✓
• c.A CanNotDelete resource lock applied automatically to each new storage account created
• d.A custom RBAC role that grants tagging permissions to every user across the tenant

Azure Policy can require a specific tag at deployment, denying non-compliant creations or appending the tag automatically. RBAC controls who can act, and Advisor only recommends, so neither enforces configuration standards.