SC-200 Certification Practice Question #72

Question

You have five on-premises Linux servers.
You have an Azure subscription that uses Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
You need to use Defender for Cloud to protect the Linux servers.
What should you install on the servers first?

Accepted Answer

To protect on-premises (non-Azure) Linux servers with Defender for Cloud, the recommended and required first step is to onboard them as Azure Arc-enabled servers, which is accomplished by installing the Azure Connected Machine agent (the Arc agent). MS Learn explicitly states this agent is required to manage Windows/Linux machines hosted outside of Azure, and that Arc-enabled machines have the Connected Machine agent installed on them. The Suggested Answer and an overwhelming community vote (64) both pick C, with the top two comments (24 and 11 👍) and multiple MS Learn pages agreeing. The Dependency agent (A) and Guest Configuration extension (D) are post-onboarding components, and the Log Analytics agent (B) is deprecated/retired and is not the prerequisite that brings a non-Azure machine into Azure. Confidence is 92 — strong tri-source agreement — held just under the top band only because a few commenters note Linux can technically be onboarded without Arc, but that path is not the recommended "first" step the question asks for.

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