Describe Azure Management and Governance
Cost tools
Three tools, three jobs. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator compares running workloads on-premises versus in Azure. The Pricing Calculator estimates the cost of a new Azure solution before you build it. Microsoft Cost Management analyzes and alerts on actual spend after deployment. Traps love swapping these: "estimate before deploying" is the Pricing Calculator, not TCO.
Governance
Tags are metadata for cost allocation and reporting - they are not inherited by default and enforce nothing. Azure Policy evaluates resources against rules and can deny non-compliant deployments or remediate them; it does not grant access. Resource locks (CanNotDelete, ReadOnly) protect resources regardless of RBAC permissions. Microsoft Purview governs data across estates; Azure Advisor gives personalized recommendations for cost, security, reliability, performance and operational excellence.
Management tooling
Portal, Cloud Shell, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, ARM templates and Bicep for infrastructure as code, plus Azure Arc for managing servers outside Azure.
Monitoring
Azure Monitor collects metrics and logs; Log Analytics queries them; Application Insights provides application telemetry and tracing; Service Health reports Azure-side incidents affecting you, while the status page covers global outages.
Worked example: composite SLA
Two dependent services, each 99.9% available, must both work: multiply 0.999 × 0.999 = 0.998001, roughly 99.8%. Adding dependencies lowers the composite SLA, while adding redundant independent paths raises it. Preview features are generally excluded from SLA guarantees - a common distractor.