A company requires periodic checks for websites hosted in Azure App Service: every five minutes verify responsiveness, enforce a response-time threshold, ensure dependent assets (images, JS) load, generate alerts on issues, and retry loading up to three additional times if a page fails. Which approach requires the least effort to meet these requirements?

A URL ping test (also known as an availability test in Azure Application Insights) is the most straightforward solution for these requirements. It can be configured to check the website every five minutes, enforce response time thresholds, and automatically retry failed requests up to three times. While it doesn't explicitly check dependent assets like images and JavaScript, it verifies the main page's availability and performance, which is often sufficient for basic health checks. Selenium web tests are complex and typically used for more in-depth functional testing, not simple availability monitoring, and running from a workstation isn't scalable or reliable. An Azure Function could query the home page, but it requires more development effort to implement retries, thresholds, and alerting compared to a built-in availability test. A multi-step web test is designed for simulating user paths across multiple pages, which is overkill for just checking a single home page and its assets. A Custom Track Availability Test is for integrating availability results from custom test frameworks, not for creating the test itself.