AZ-400 domain - 8% of the exam

Implement an Instrumentation Strategy

Implement an Instrumentation Strategy is 8% of the Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions (AZ-400) (AZ-400) exam. These are the objectives it covers, each with practice questions and worked explanations.

Objectives in this domain

Sample question from this domain

Free sampleImplement an Instrumentation Strategymedium

A team runs an ASP.NET web API on Azure App Service and wants automatic collection of request rates, response times, failure counts, and end-to-end dependency calls to downstream databases, with distributed traces that correlate a single user request across services. Which Azure capability should they enable to gather this application-level telemetry?

  • AEnable VM Insights on the underlying compute so the platform collects processor, memory, and disk counters together with a map of network connections between the hosts running the web API.
  • BEnable Container Insights for the App Service plan so the platform scrapes container processor and memory usage and surfaces node and pod health for the workload hosting the web API.
  • CEnable "Application Insights" for the web API so it auto-collects request and dependency telemetry, failure counts, and correlated distributed traces across the calls a single user request makes. Correct
  • DEnable a diagnostic setting that streams the App Service platform logs to a Log Analytics workspace so the team can query raw HTTP server logs and stored console output for the web API.
Select Application Insights to auto-collect request, dependency, and failure telemetry with correlated distributed traces for an application. Application Insights is the application performance monitoring component of Azure Monitor. When enabled on a web app it auto-instruments incoming requests, outbound dependency calls, and exceptions, then correlates them by operation id into distributed traces. Infrastructure-focused options such as VM Insights or Container Insights report host and container resource counters rather than per-request application behaviour, so they cannot supply the dependency and trace data described.

Why A is wrong: VM Insights gathers guest performance counters and a dependency map for virtual machines, which is tempting for any compute, but it does not capture request rates, traces, or application dependency calls inside the API.

Why B is wrong: Container Insights monitors container and node resource usage for AKS and container workloads, which sounds plausible, but it reports infrastructure metrics rather than the per-request application traces and dependency calls the team needs.

Why C is correct: "Application Insights" is the application performance management service that auto-instruments requests, dependencies, and exceptions and correlates them into end-to-end distributed traces, exactly matching the stated need.

Why D is wrong: Streaming platform logs to a workspace captures coarse HTTP and console output, which is useful, but it provides no automatic dependency tracking or correlated distributed traces across services.

Other domains in this exam

See also the AZ-400 cert hub, the study guide, and the cheat sheet.

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