Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

Your company uses management groups to separate environments. A new policy initiative must be enforced on all subscriptions under the "Prod" management group. However, one subscription hosts a regulated workload that must be exempt from a single policy definition (Deny public IP on NIC) while still inheriting all other policies in the initiative. You must implement the exemption with the least administrative overhead and preserve inheritance. What should you do?

You have an Azure subscription with multiple resource groups. A team needs to create and manage role assignments for resources in a single resource group (RG-App1), but must not be able to create, update, or delete any resources in that group. Additionally, they must not be able to elevate their own access or assign roles outside RG-App1. Which solution meets the requirements?

You manage an Azure Storage account that hosts an Azure Files share used by legacy applications. A security audit requires that SMB access must be restricted to clients joined to your on-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) and that storage account keys must not be used by clients. You also must ensure the applications can continue to mount the share over SMB without rewriting them. What should you implement?

A storage account contains critical blobs. You must meet these requirements: prevent accidental deletion, allow legitimate deletions after a 30-day retention period, and ensure administrators cannot permanently delete data immediately even if they have Owner permissions on the subscription. Which configuration best meets the requirements?

You have an Azure VM scale set (VMSS) hosting a stateless web API. You must roll out an urgent configuration change with minimal downtime and ensure that at least 90% of instances remain available during the update. The current upgrade policy is manual and updates have caused capacity dips. What should you configure?

A VM running a line-of-business app is in an availability zone. The app requires extremely low latency storage and must survive a VM host failure. You are asked to improve disk performance and resiliency without changing the VM size. Which action best meets the requirement?

Your organization uses Azure Update Manager (or equivalent patch orchestration) for VMs. A set of VMs must patch only during a maintenance window and must not reboot automatically if the app health probe is failing. You need a solution that coordinates patches, respects a schedule, and uses health signals to gate reboots. What should you implement?

You have a hub-and-spoke network. Spokes are peered to the hub. A third-party NVA in the hub provides forced tunneling to on-premises via a site-to-site VPN. You must ensure that all internet-bound traffic from spokes is forced through the NVA, but spoke-to-spoke traffic must stay within Azure and not hairpin to on-premises. What is the best approach?

A PaaS application in a spoke VNet must access an Azure Storage account using a private endpoint. DNS resolution intermittently returns the public endpoint from some subnets, causing connectivity failures because public network access is disabled on the storage account. You already created the private endpoint and associated it with the spoke VNet. What is the most likely root cause and fix?

You use Azure Monitor alerts to detect when a VM’s data disk latency exceeds a threshold. During an incident, you notice the alert fired correctly, but the on-call team did not receive any notification. The alert rule shows it was triggered multiple times. You must ensure reliable notifications and prevent missed incidents. What should you check/configure first?