You operate a multi-region retail platform experiencing frequent configuration drift and hard-to-diagnose incidents. Deployments are still manual for the next quarter, but you must immediately improve operational excellence by ensuring consistent environments and actionable insights into failures and SLOs. What two steps should you implement first?

The correct options address the immediate need to improve operational excellence by tackling configuration drift and providing actionable insights. Defining infrastructure as code (IaC) with Bicep/ARM templates, Git version control, pull requests, and validation directly combats configuration drift and ensures consistent environments. Enabling end-to-end observability with Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, and SLO-based alerts provides the necessary insights to diagnose failures quickly and understand service level objective (SLO) adherence. Continuing manual changes and monthly reconciliation perpetuates the problem. Performing in-place upgrades during peak hours is a highly disruptive and risky practice, not a solution for operational excellence. Disabling sampling in Application Insights would drastically increase telemetry costs and ingestion, not eliminate them, and is generally not recommended for cost-efficiency.