Control: Azure > CIS v5.0 > 6 - Management and Governance Services > 6.01 - Logging and Monitoring > 6.01.05 - Ensure that SKU Basic/Consumption is not used on artifacts that need to be monitored (Particularly for Production Workloads)

Configures auditing against a CIS Benchmark item.

Level: 2

The use of Basic or Free SKUs in Azure whilst cost effective have significant limitations in terms of what can be monitored and what support can be realized from Microsoft. Typically, these SKUs do not have a service SLA and Microsoft may refuse to provide support for them. Consequently Basic/Free SKUs should never be used for production workloads.

While an automated assessment procedure exists for this recommendation, the assessment status remains manual. Determining appropriate SKUs depends on the context and requirements of each organization and environment.

Typically, production workloads need to be monitored and should have an SLA with Microsoft, using Basic SKUs for any deployed product will mean that that these capabilities do not exist.

The following resource types should use standard SKUs as a minimum. - Public IP Addresses - Network Load Balancers - Redis Cache - SQL Database - VPN Gateways