MSAP case studies
MSAP · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate credential validates the day-to-day skills needed to implement, manage, and monitor an organization's Azure environment. It is aimed at administrators who already work with Azure-or are moving into that role-and who need to prove they can handle identities, governance, storage, compute, virtual networking, and monitoring in the portal, with the Azure CLI, and with Azure PowerShell. The MSAP case studies are 5 cases and about 5,760 words.
1Break-Glass Accounts, PIM, and a Service Account That Cannot Do MFA
Contoso has 1,400 Microsoft Entra ID user accounts and a single Entra ID P2 tenant. Sixty engineers hold the User Access Administrator role permanently at subscription scope, and last quarter's review found 12 role assignments nobody could justify.
1,109 words, about 6 min2Lifecycle Rules, Versioning, and a Storage Firewall Change
Fabrikam stores 85 TB of scanned engineering drawings in a GPv2 storage account (StorageV2, LRS, West Europe) as block blobs in the hot tier. About 4% of the archive is read each month, and 70% of the data has not been touched for 400 days.
1,156 words, about 6 min3A Scale Set That Scaled Out but Did Not Get Faster
Northwind runs a customer-facing API on a VM scale set (Uniform, 6 instances, three availability zones, Standard D4s v5, Ubuntu 22.04) behind a Standard Load Balancer. Autoscale uses a single rule: scale out when average CPU 70% for 10 minutes, scale in when CPU <30% for 10 minutes, minimum 2, maximum 12, default cool-down 5 minutes.
1,129 words, about 6 min4Spoke-to-Spoke Traffic Through a Hub Firewall, and an Overlapping Acquisition
Tailspin has a hub VNet 10.100.0.0/16 in East US with Azure Firewall (10.100.1.4) in AzureFirewallSubnet, a GatewaySubnet with a site-to-site VPN to on-premises 192.168.0.0/16, and a shared services subnet. Three spoke VNets peer to the hub with 'Use remote gateways' enabled: prod 10.101.0.0/16, dev 10.102.0.0/16, and a newly acquired company's VNet 10.0.0.0/16 in West Europe.
1,158 words, about 6 min5Log Analytics Cost, Table Retention, and Diagnostic Gaps
Litware has 220 VMs across three subscriptions, all sending performance counters and event logs to a single Log Analytics workspace (Pay-as-you-go, 90-day retention) via one data collection rule. The workspace ingests 4.8 TB per month, of which 3.1 TB is Perf and 1.2 TB is the SecurityEvent table.
1,208 words, about 6 min