Microsoft Azure Architect Design (AZ-301) Practice Exam

Which Azure monitoring service is best to track requests and exceptions in a web application?

1. Azure Application Insights

2. Azure Log Analytics

3. Azure Service Map

4. Azure Activity Log

The correct answer is: Azure Application Insights

Azure Application Insights is specifically designed for monitoring web applications and provides extensive capabilities to track requests, exceptions, and performance issues. It integrates seamlessly with your application to collect telemetry data automatically, allowing developers and DevOps professionals to gain deep insights into how users interact with their applications. With Application Insights, you can monitor live web applications, analyze user behavior, and identify trends or anomalies in real time. Its features include automatic exception tracking, which captures unhandled exceptions and provides detailed information about the context in which they occurred. Additionally, it offers powerful query capabilities and visualization tools, enabling you to generate diagnostics and performance metrics. The other monitoring services, while valuable in their own right, do not specifically focus on tracking individual requests and exceptions in web applications. Azure Log Analytics provides a broader approach to log data analysis, and while it can be useful for certain monitoring tasks, it doesn't automatically track application-specific telemetry like Application Insights does. Azure Service Map is more suited for visualizing the relationships and dependencies between services rather than detailed application monitoring. Azure Activity Log is focused on providing insights into the operations performed on Azure resources but does not cater to the nuances of application performance and user interaction tracking.