Where Azure Money Actually Goes
Cost questions are usually about recognising which lever applies. The levers are few, and the waste is predictable.
Exam tip. Read carefully whether the question asks to prevent or to detect. Budgets never prevent anything on their own.
Policy, Locks, and Knowing When Something Is Wrong
Governance and monitoring are the two halves of running an estate: deciding what is allowed before it is deployed, and finding out quickly when something breaks afterwards.
Exam tip. When several services could plausibly answer, ask whether the scenario is about preventing a change, recording one, or reacting to one. Those three verbs separate Policy, Monitor and Advisor cleanly.
What Microsoft Promises, and What You Get When It Is Not Met
SLA questions are arithmetic and exclusions rather than memorised percentages. Know how composite SLAs behave and which services carry no commitment at all.
Exam tip. When asked whether adding a dependency raises or lowers availability, the answer is lower unless that dependency is redundant.
From Estimate to Invoice, and the Levers in Between
Cost questions follow a lifecycle: estimate before, control during, analyse after. Each stage has one right tool, and the exam swaps them deliberately.
Exam tip. Prevention is policy. Everything else reports after the money is spent. Read which one the question wants.
Six Governance Controls and Exactly What Each One Stops
Governance questions are answered by matching the verb in the scenario to the control. Prevent, record, protect, organise, limit and review are six different jobs.
Exam tip. RBAC is cumulative and additive. Policy is cumulative and restrictive. When they seem to conflict, both apply and the restriction wins.
Knowing Something Broke, and Knowing Whose Fault It Was
Azure separates the health of the platform from the health of your resources from the behaviour of your application. Each has its own tool, and questions turn on which one is being asked about.
Exam tip. Is it Azure, my resource, or my code? Those three questions map to Service Health, Resource Health and Application Insights.