Objective 4.0

Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution

ACE Practice Questions

Use this page to practise Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution questions for this certification. Focus on how the exam tests ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution in scenario format — understanding the why behind each answer builds more durable knowledge than memorising options.

Full Practice Test →All Objectives

What this objective tests

ACE Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution — Key Topics

Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution questions on this certification test your ability to deploy and manage ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution concepts in scenario-based situations.

Core Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution concepts and how they apply in real-world cloud scenarios.
How to deploy ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution correctly and verify the outcome.
Troubleshooting ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution issues by interpreting error output and system state.
Cloud best practices and Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution design trade-offs tested by this certification.

Common exam traps

Where candidates lose marks on Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution

⚠Selecting the most expensive service when a simpler managed option meets the requirement.
⚠Forgetting that cloud resources must be explicitly secured — defaults are rarely secure.
⚠Choosing a global service fix when the issue is region-specific.
⚠Overlooking cost implications of cross-region data transfer in architecture questions.

ACE Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution — Practice Questions

30 questions from this objective

Question 2easymultiple choice

Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution

ACE Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution — Key Topics

Where candidates lose marks on Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution

ACE Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution — Practice Questions

A team wants to receive an email alert when the average CPU utilization of VMs in a managed instance group exceeds 80% for more than 5 minutes. What should they create in Cloud Monitoring?

A team wants logs from their Python application running on a Compute Engine VM to appear in Cloud Logging. What must be installed on the VM?

A security analyst needs to retrieve all Cloud Logging entries with severity ERROR or higher across all resource types in the current project. Which log query correctly filters these entries?

A managed instance group (MIG) is running 4 VMs with a CPU autoscaling target of 60%. A traffic spike drives average CPU to 90%. How does the autoscaler respond?

A load balancer is routing traffic to a VM where the application process has crashed, but the VM itself is still running. What prevents the load balancer from continuing to send traffic to this instance?

A microservices application has intermittent high latency. The team wants to identify which specific service-to-service call in the request chain is causing the slowdown. Which Cloud Operations tool is designed for this?

A Go service is consuming significantly more CPU than expected. The team suspects an inefficient function but doesn't know which one. Which Cloud Operations tool identifies CPU hotspots in production code?

A team wants proactive alerting if their public HTTPS endpoint returns a non-2xx HTTP status code or becomes unreachable — before users report it. Which Cloud Monitoring capability provides this?

A company runs a stable production workload on 20 n2-standard-8 VMs that run continuously year-round. Which pricing commitment maximizes cost savings on these VMs?

A GKE Deployment must be updated to a new container image version with zero downtime — old Pods should be replaced gradually, not all at once. Which update strategy should be configured?

A Cloud Run service has been running for weeks. A sudden spike in 5xx errors appears in Cloud Monitoring. The team wants to view the actual request logs to identify which endpoint is failing. Where should they look?

A managed instance group serves production traffic. During a rolling update to a new VM template, 30% of instances become unhealthy (failing health checks). The update has not completed yet. What should the team do to immediately restore service?

A team wants to automatically restart any GKE Pod that fails a liveness probe three consecutive times. The probe should check HTTP GET /healthz on port 8080, starting after 30 seconds and checking every 10 seconds. Which Pod spec configuration implements this?

A production GKE cluster is running low on node resources. Pods are in Pending state because no node has sufficient CPU or memory. Without deleting existing Pods, what is the fastest way to resolve this?

A billing report shows a Compute Engine VM has been running unused for 3 months. The team wants to stop it to save costs but needs the VM's disk data preserved for potential future use. What should they do?

A team needs to export all Cloud Logging entries from a production GCP project to a BigQuery dataset for long-term analysis and compliance. The export must be near-real-time and include future log entries automatically. Which approach achieves this?

A DevOps team monitors a Cloud SQL instance and notices its CPU is consistently above 85% for several hours. The instance handles a critical production database. What should be the team's immediate action?

A Cloud Run service handles payment processing. A monitoring alert shows the service is experiencing 3-second P99 latency, up from its normal 200ms. The team wants to find the slowest individual requests in the last hour. Which tool provides per-request latency data?

A cost-conscious team notices their GKE cluster's node pools have consistently high memory utilization (>90%) while CPU remains at 30%. Pods are occasionally OOMKilled. What should they do to balance resource efficiency and stability?

A GKE node pool has an autoscaler configured with min=2, max=10 nodes. After a sustained traffic surge, the cluster scaled to 10 nodes. Traffic drops overnight to its normal level, but the cluster remains at 10 nodes after 4 hours. What is the most likely reason?

A team's GCP project is approaching its monthly budget. They want to receive an email alert when spending reaches 80% and 100% of the $500 monthly budget. Which GCP feature sends these budget alerts?

A team's application emits a custom business metric (orders per minute) via its code. They want to display this metric on a Cloud Monitoring dashboard and alert when it drops below 50 orders per minute. What must be done first?

An operations team wants to count how many times the string 'PaymentFailure' appears in application logs per minute and alert when it exceeds 10 occurrences. Cloud Monitoring doesn't have a native metric for this log pattern. What is the correct approach?

A platform team wants to define a formal service level objective (SLO) for their API: 99.9% of requests must succeed (HTTP 2xx) over a 30-day rolling window. Which Cloud Monitoring feature tracks this?

A GKE cluster running Kubernetes 1.27 needs to be upgraded to 1.29. The cluster has a stateful workload with a PodDisruptionBudget requiring at least 2 out of 3 replicas running at all times. What is the correct upgrade sequence?

A team wants to create a consistent backup of a Compute Engine VM's boot disk before applying a major OS patch. The backup should be usable to restore the disk to a new VM if the patch fails. What is the recommended approach?

A team stores application log archives in a Cloud Storage bucket. Logs older than 90 days should automatically move to Coldline storage, and logs older than 365 days should be deleted. Which feature automates this?

A BigQuery table in a data pipeline receives daily data loads. To control storage costs, the team wants table data older than 180 days to be automatically deleted at the table level, not the dataset level. How should this be configured?

A monitoring alert fires at 3 AM — the team's GKE Pods are being evicted. Investigation shows node memory is at 98%. Pods without resource requests are being evicted first. What is the long-term fix to prevent evictions?

A team needs a database backup job to run every day at 2 AM UTC. The job calls an HTTP endpoint to trigger the backup. The endpoint requires no complex orchestration — just a timed HTTP call. Which GCP service handles this most simply?

All ACE Objectives

Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution

ACE Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution — Key Topics

Where candidates lose marks on Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution

ACE Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution — Practice Questions

A team wants to receive an email alert when the average CPU utilization of VMs in a managed instance group exceeds 80% for more than 5 minutes. What should they create in Cloud Monitoring?

A team wants logs from their Python application running on a Compute Engine VM to appear in Cloud Logging. What must be installed on the VM?

A security analyst needs to retrieve all Cloud Logging entries with severity ERROR or higher across all resource types in the current project. Which log query correctly filters these entries?

A managed instance group (MIG) is running 4 VMs with a CPU autoscaling target of 60%. A traffic spike drives average CPU to 90%. How does the autoscaler respond?

A load balancer is routing traffic to a VM where the application process has crashed, but the VM itself is still running. What prevents the load balancer from continuing to send traffic to this instance?

A microservices application has intermittent high latency. The team wants to identify which specific service-to-service call in the request chain is causing the slowdown. Which Cloud Operations tool is designed for this?

A Go service is consuming significantly more CPU than expected. The team suspects an inefficient function but doesn't know which one. Which Cloud Operations tool identifies CPU hotspots in production code?

A team wants proactive alerting if their public HTTPS endpoint returns a non-2xx HTTP status code or becomes unreachable — before users report it. Which Cloud Monitoring capability provides this?

A company runs a stable production workload on 20 n2-standard-8 VMs that run continuously year-round. Which pricing commitment maximizes cost savings on these VMs?

A GKE Deployment must be updated to a new container image version with zero downtime — old Pods should be replaced gradually, not all at once. Which update strategy should be configured?

A Cloud Run service has been running for weeks. A sudden spike in 5xx errors appears in Cloud Monitoring. The team wants to view the actual request logs to identify which endpoint is failing. Where should they look?

A managed instance group serves production traffic. During a rolling update to a new VM template, 30% of instances become unhealthy (failing health checks). The update has not completed yet. What should the team do to immediately restore service?

A team wants to automatically restart any GKE Pod that fails a liveness probe three consecutive times. The probe should check HTTP GET /healthz on port 8080, starting after 30 seconds and checking every 10 seconds. Which Pod spec configuration implements this?

A production GKE cluster is running low on node resources. Pods are in Pending state because no node has sufficient CPU or memory. Without deleting existing Pods, what is the fastest way to resolve this?

A billing report shows a Compute Engine VM has been running unused for 3 months. The team wants to stop it to save costs but needs the VM's disk data preserved for potential future use. What should they do?

A team needs to export all Cloud Logging entries from a production GCP project to a BigQuery dataset for long-term analysis and compliance. The export must be near-real-time and include future log entries automatically. Which approach achieves this?

A DevOps team monitors a Cloud SQL instance and notices its CPU is consistently above 85% for several hours. The instance handles a critical production database. What should be the team's immediate action?

A Cloud Run service handles payment processing. A monitoring alert shows the service is experiencing 3-second P99 latency, up from its normal 200ms. The team wants to find the slowest individual requests in the last hour. Which tool provides per-request latency data?

A cost-conscious team notices their GKE cluster's node pools have consistently high memory utilization (>90%) while CPU remains at 30%. Pods are occasionally OOMKilled. What should they do to balance resource efficiency and stability?

A GKE node pool has an autoscaler configured with min=2, max=10 nodes. After a sustained traffic surge, the cluster scaled to 10 nodes. Traffic drops overnight to its normal level, but the cluster remains at 10 nodes after 4 hours. What is the most likely reason?

A team's GCP project is approaching its monthly budget. They want to receive an email alert when spending reaches 80% and 100% of the $500 monthly budget. Which GCP feature sends these budget alerts?

A team's application emits a custom business metric (orders per minute) via its code. They want to display this metric on a Cloud Monitoring dashboard and alert when it drops below 50 orders per minute. What must be done first?

An operations team wants to count how many times the string 'PaymentFailure' appears in application logs per minute and alert when it exceeds 10 occurrences. Cloud Monitoring doesn't have a native metric for this log pattern. What is the correct approach?

A platform team wants to define a formal service level objective (SLO) for their API: 99.9% of requests must succeed (HTTP 2xx) over a 30-day rolling window. Which Cloud Monitoring feature tracks this?

A GKE cluster running Kubernetes 1.27 needs to be upgraded to 1.29. The cluster has a stateful workload with a PodDisruptionBudget requiring at least 2 out of 3 replicas running at all times. What is the correct upgrade sequence?

A team wants to create a consistent backup of a Compute Engine VM's boot disk before applying a major OS patch. The backup should be usable to restore the disk to a new VM if the patch fails. What is the recommended approach?

A team stores application log archives in a Cloud Storage bucket. Logs older than 90 days should automatically move to Coldline storage, and logs older than 365 days should be deleted. Which feature automates this?

A BigQuery table in a data pipeline receives daily data loads. To control storage costs, the team wants table data older than 180 days to be automatically deleted at the table level, not the dataset level. How should this be configured?

A monitoring alert fires at 3 AM — the team's GKE Pods are being evicted. Investigation shows node memory is at 98%. Pods without resource requests are being evicted first. What is the long-term fix to prevent evictions?

A team needs a database backup job to run every day at 2 AM UTC. The job calls an HTTP endpoint to trigger the backup. The endpoint requires no complex orchestration — just a timed HTTP call. Which GCP service handles this most simply?

All ACE Objectives