Google PCA Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability Practice Test 3 — 15 Questions

Question 1

You need to set up monitoring and alerting for a critical service that must maintain an error rate below 0.1%. You want to be notified if the error rate exceeds this threshold over a 5-minute window. Which THREE components should you configure?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Service Level Indicator (SLI) based on error rate. A service-level objective (SLO) defines the target (99.9% error-free). A service-level indicator (SLI) measures the actual error rate. An alerting policy triggers when the SLO is breached. Notification channels send alerts. Log-based alerts are for log content, not metrics. The correct combination: SLO, SLI, alerting policy with notification channels.

Answer

Log-based alert with filter for all errors

Answer

Cloud Audit Logs sink to BigQuery

Question 2

Your company plans to connect an on-premises data center to Google Cloud with a Dedicated Interconnect. You need to ensure high availability for the connection. What is the minimum configuration required to meet a 99.99% SLA for Dedicated Interconnect?

Accepted Answer

Two Dedicated Interconnect circuits, each in a different edge availability domain, with a Cloud Router for each connection. Dedicated Interconnect requires two separate circuits (each 10 Gbps or 100 Gbps) to achieve a 99.99% SLA. A single circuit provides a 99.9% SLA, and Google Cloud recommends using two circuits in different edge availability domains. Cloud Router alone does not provide redundancy without multiple VLAN attachments and circuits.

Answer

A single Dedicated Interconnect circuit with a Cloud Router configured for BGP advertisements

Answer

One Dedicated Interconnect circuit and one Partner Interconnect connection as a backup

Answer

One Dedicated Interconnect circuit with two VLAN attachments on the same circuit

Question 3

Your organization wants to use Cloud SQL for a MySQL database with automatic failover in the event of a zone outage. Which configuration should you choose?

Accepted Answer

Create a regional Cloud SQL instance (high availability) with a primary and standby zone. Cloud SQL provides high availability by creating a primary instance in one zone and a standby instance (failover replica) in another zone within the same region. Automatic failover is enabled when you create a regional Cloud SQL instance. A read replica does not provide automatic failover.

Answer

Set up Cloud SQL with external replication to a VM in another zone

Answer

Create a Cloud SQL instance with a cross-region read replica

Answer

Create a single-zone Cloud SQL instance with automatic backups enabled

Question 4

You need to monitor the performance of a production Cloud Run service and set an alert when the p99 latency exceeds 500 ms over a 5-minute window. Which combination of Cloud Monitoring resources should you use?

Accepted Answer

Define an alerting policy using the metric 'run.googleapis.com/request_latencies' with a percentile aggregator and threshold condition. To alert on latency, you create a custom metric or use an existing metric (e.g., request latencies), then define a threshold condition using an alerting policy. The alerting policy specifies the metric (request latency), aggregator (p99), condition (threshold >500ms for 5 minutes), and notification channel.

Answer

Create a log-based metric for latency and an alerting policy with a condition on the count of logs

Answer

Use Cloud Logging to export logs to BigQuery and run a scheduled query to check latency

Answer

Create an uptime check and set an alert on the check response time

Question 5

Your company uses Cloud Spanner in a multi-region configuration to achieve 99.999% availability. You need to understand the impact of a regional failure on read and write availability. Which statement is correct?

Accepted Answer

Writes are unavailable if the region containing the leader replica fails, but reads remain available. Cloud Spanner multi-region configurations use a voting protocol. For read-write operations, a majority of replicas must be available. If one region fails, writes may be impacted if the remaining regions do not have a majority. However, reads can still be served from healthy replicas in other regions (though they may be stale).

Answer

Both reads and writes are fully available as long as at least one region remains healthy

Answer

Reads and writes remain fully available because Cloud Spanner uses synchronous replication across all regions

Answer

Writes are always available, but reads may be unavailable if the region with the closest replica fails

Question 6

Your team uses a GKE cluster with Autopilot mode. You want to ensure that your workloads can tolerate a node failure without manual intervention. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Configure a PodDisruptionBudget and deploy multiple replicas of your pods across different nodes. GKE Autopilot automatically manages nodes and provides workload-level SLAs. By setting the pod's 'disruption budget' and ensuring replicas are distributed across nodes (which Autopilot does by default), the cluster will automatically reschedule pods if a node fails. No manual node management is required.

Answer

Enable cluster multi-zonal and set pod anti-affinity rules

Answer

Create a node pool with multiple zones and enable cluster autoscaling

Answer

Use StatefulSets with persistent volumes that are replicated across zones

Question 7

You want to create a log-based alert in Cloud Logging that triggers when a specific error message appears in application logs. What is the first step?

Accepted Answer

Create a logs-based metric that filters for the error message. To create a log-based alert, you first define a logs-based metric that counts occurrences of the error pattern. Then you create an alerting policy that monitors this metric and triggers when the count exceeds a threshold. Notifications are configured in the alerting policy, not the metric.

Answer

Configure a Pub/Sub notification channel for alerts

Answer

Create a log sink to export logs to Cloud Storage

Answer

Set up an alerting policy directly on the log entries without a metric

Question 8

Your company runs a production application on Compute Engine instances behind a managed instance group (MIG). You need to perform a rolling update with canary testing, gradually shifting traffic to the new version only if performance metrics are healthy. Which approach should you use?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Deploy with a deployment strategy that includes a canary phase and automated verification. Cloud Deploy can be used to orchestrate canary deployments on Compute Engine. However, a more direct approach is to use a MIG with a canary configuration: you can update the MIG's instance template and use a new MIG for the canary version, then adjust the load balancer's backend weights to shift traffic gradually. Cloud Deploy supports this with deployment strategies.

Answer

Create a new MIG with the new template and use a Cloud Load Balancer's traffic splitting

Answer

Manually update each instance by SSH'ing and running a script

Answer

Use gcloud compute instance-groups managed rolling-action start-update with a maxSurge of 0

Question 9

Your organization stores critical financial data in Cloud Storage. You need to ensure that if an object is deleted or overwritten, you can recover it within 30 days. What feature should you enable?

Accepted Answer

Enable object versioning on the bucket. Cloud Storage offers object versioning and retention policies to protect data. Versioning keeps non-current versions of objects, allowing recovery from accidental deletion or overwrites. Object retention policies (e.g., retention policy or hold) prevent deletion or modification for a specified period, but versioning is the primary mechanism to recover from deletion.

Answer

Set a retention policy with a 30-day retention period

Answer

Configure lifecycle management to delete objects after 30 days

Answer

Enable Bucket Lock with a retention policy

Question 10

Your team uses Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL for an e-commerce application. You want to perform point-in-time recovery (PITR) to recover from a logical error that occurred 10 minutes ago. Which prerequisites are required?

Accepted Answer

Automated backups must be enabled, and write-ahead logging (WAL) must be active. Cloud SQL PITR requires automated backups and binary logging (for MySQL) or write-ahead logging (for PostgreSQL) to be enabled. Automated backups must be configured, and the instance must be using the appropriate database flags. For PostgreSQL, 'cloudsql.logical_decoding' and 'cloudsql.enable_pitr' are needed.

Answer

Automated backups must be enabled, and the instance must be using the InnoDB storage engine

Answer

Automated backups and binary logging must be enabled

Answer

Point-in-time recovery is not supported for Cloud SQL PostgreSQL

Question 11

You need to run a load test against a web application hosted on Compute Engine. Which tool is recommended for generating HTTP traffic and measuring performance?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Load Testing (based on Locust). Google Cloud's recommended load testing tool is the Cloud Load Testing tool (also known as Distributed Load Testing using Kubernetes), which can deploy Locust or other load generators. Alternatively, you can use Locust or Apache JMeter directly. The Cloud Load Testing solution is a ready-to-use option.

Answer

Stackdriver Monitoring (now Cloud Monitoring)

Answer

gcloud compute ssh to manually send requests

Answer

Cloud Shell's built-in load generator

Question 12

Your company uses Cloud VPN (HA VPN) to connect to Google Cloud. You need to achieve a 99.99% SLA for the VPN connection. What configuration is required?

Accepted Answer

Two VPN gateways, each with two tunnels, totaling four tunnels. HA VPN provides a 99.99% SLA when configured with two VPN gateways (each with two tunnels) for a total of four tunnels, and the tunnels are configured to use two different edge availability domains in Google Cloud and two different interfaces on the on-premises VPN device.

Answer

One VPN gateway with four tunnels to different on-premises devices

Answer

Two VPN gateways, each with one tunnel, using two different edge availability domains

Answer

One VPN gateway with two tunnels to the same on-premises device

Question 13

Your team is following an incident management process. After resolving a major incident, you are tasked with conducting a postmortem. What is the PRIMARY goal of the postmortem process in Google Cloud's recommended approach?

Accepted Answer

Understand the root cause and implement changes to prevent recurrence. Google's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) approach emphasizes blameless postmortems. The primary goal is to learn from the incident and improve the system to prevent recurrence, not to assign blame or track individual performance.

Answer

Document the incident timeline and communicate it to stakeholders

Answer

Calculate the financial impact and bill the responsible team

Answer

Identify the individual responsible for the incident and take corrective action

Question 14

You are designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application running on GKE. You need to back up the cluster's state and application data. Which TWO services should you use together? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Velero (formerly Heptio Ark). Velero is the standard tool for backing up GKE clusters and can store backups in Cloud Storage. Cloud Storage provides durable and versioned storage for backup artifacts. Filestore is for file storage, not cluster backups; Cloud SQL is for databases; Pub/Sub is for messaging.

Answer

Pub/Sub

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Filestore

Question 15

Your company wants to implement a canary deployment for a microservice running on GKE. You need to gradually shift traffic from the stable version to the canary version while monitoring error rates. Which THREE components or practices should you use? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Cloud Deploy with an automated canary strategy and verification. A canary deployment on GKE typically uses a service mesh like Istio for fine-grained traffic splitting, Cloud Monitoring for observability, and automated rollback via a progressive delivery tool or manual intervention. Cloud Deploy also supports canary strategies. Cloud CDN is for content delivery, not internal traffic splitting. Feature flags are for feature toggles, not traffic shifting.

Answer

Cloud CDN for caching responses

Answer

Feature flags in the application code