Microsoft Azure Architect Design (AZ-301) Practice Exam 2026 - Free Azure Architect Practice Questions and Study Guide

Azure Monitor is the primary service designed to provide comprehensive monitoring and diagnostics for Azure resources. It collects and analyzes data from various sources within your Azure environment, allowing you to gain insights into the performance and health of your applications, infrastructure, and services. This enables proactive management and optimization of resources, ensuring reliability and efficiency in operations.

Utilizing Azure Monitor, you can set up alerts, visualize data through dashboards, and create log analytics to track resource usage and performance trends. This capability makes it essential for maintaining operational excellence and quickly diagnosing issues within your Azure deployments.

While Azure Application Insights is also a valuable tool for monitoring applications specifically, focusing on application performance and user behavior, its scope is narrower compared to Azure Monitor, which encompasses the entire Azure ecosystem. Azure Security Center, on the other hand, is tailored primarily for security management and threat protection rather than overall monitoring. Azure Traffic Manager is used for load balancing and routing traffic across different geographic locations, which does not pertain to monitoring and diagnostics in the same way.