Microsoft Azure Architect Design (AZ-301) Practice Exam

Which metrics should be monitored to receive notifications regarding the health of a configured load balancer supporting multiple virtual machines?

1. Health Probe Status

2. Data Path Availability

3. SNAT Connection Count

4. SYN Count

The correct answer is: SYN Count

The correct metric to monitor for receiving notifications regarding the health of a configured load balancer that supports multiple virtual machines is the Health Probe Status. The Health Probe is specifically designed to check the health of the back-end instances behind the load balancer. It periodically sends requests to the configured health probe endpoint on each virtual machine to determine whether they are healthy and able to handle traffic. By monitoring the Health Probe Status, you can effectively assess whether the load balancer is directing traffic to functioning virtual machines. If any virtual machine fails to respond correctly to the health probe, the load balancer can stop sending traffic to that instance, thus ensuring that only healthy instances are serving requests. This monitoring is crucial for maintaining high availability and performance within your infrastructure. While the other metrics like Data Path Availability, SNAT Connection Count, and SYN Count can provide additional insights into the performance and behavior of the load balancer and associated network traffic, they are not primarily focused on the health of the virtual machines themselves. Therefore, in the context of monitoring for notifications related to the health of the load balancer's back-end, the Health Probe Status is the most relevant and critical metric.