Horizon Retail wants to continuously track their ExpressRoute circuit availability and be alerted when on‑prem → Azure connectivity degrades. Which Azure feature combination gives best visibility into circuit health and path availability?

The correct answer provides the most comprehensive monitoring solution. Network Watcher Connection Monitor offers end-to-end visibility into connectivity performance (latency, packet loss, path information) across the ExpressRoute, which is crucial for detecting degradation. Integrating this with Azure Alerts ensures timely notifications. Additionally, monitoring ExpressRoute circuit metrics and BGP peering state directly from the ExpressRoute resource in Azure Monitor provides essential health and operational status of the circuit itself. Relying solely on Azure Service Health is insufficient as it primarily reports on Azure service incidents, not granular ExpressRoute performance or hop-by-hop diagnostics. Azure Advisor provides recommendations for best practices and cost optimization but doesn't offer real-time performance monitoring or outage detection for specific ExpressRoute circuits. Installing a third-party probe and polling an API every 24 hours is not the only supported method, lacks real-time monitoring capabilities, and is generally less integrated than native Azure tools.