Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure (AZ-204) Practice Exam

What is a recommended action if your cloud application's monthly bill is unexpectedly high?

1. Wait a month and recheck your bill.

2. Increase application testing before each release.

3. Add monitoring and instrumentation to your application.

4. Scale up your virtual machines immediately.

The correct answer is: Add monitoring and instrumentation to your application.

Adding monitoring and instrumentation to your application is a proactive and effective strategy when faced with an unexpectedly high monthly cloud bill. This approach enables you to gain visibility into various aspects of your application's performance and resource utilization. By setting up detailed monitoring, you can track metrics such as CPU and memory usage, network traffic, and storage I/O. Instrumentation allows you to collect data on how your application behaves under different loads and workloads. With this information, you can identify inefficiencies, pinpoint areas of excessive resource consumption, and understand usage patterns. Consequently, you can make more informed decisions on optimization, whether that means refining specific components of your application, adjusting resource allocations, or implementing cost-saving measures. The other options do not effectively address the immediate need for understanding the cause of the high bill. Waiting a month does not provide any valuable insight and could allow costs to escalate further. Increasing testing before each release is beneficial for application reliability but is not aimed at identifying or rectifying cost issues. Scaling up virtual machines without understanding the underlying cost drivers may exacerbate the problem by increasing resource consumption without guaranteeing a resolution to the billing concerns.