PCDE Practice Test 28 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A team wants to implement a slow burn alert for error budget consumption. Which configuration should they use?

Accepted Answer

Alert on error budget burn rate > 5 over 6 hours. Slow burn alert uses a 6-hour window and a burn rate threshold of 5 (or similar). This allows detecting gradual budget consumption.

Answer

Alert on error budget burn rate > 2 over 12 hours

Answer

Alert on error budget burn rate > 14 over 1 hour

Answer

Alert on error budget burn rate > 20 over 30 minutes

Question 2

Which TWO metrics are appropriate for defining a request-based SLI for a web service? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Latency: proportion of requests under a threshold. Request-based SLIs include availability (successful/total) and latency (proportion under threshold). Throughput and error count are not SLIs themselves but can be used in SLO definitions. Uptime is a window-based metric.

Answer

Throughput: requests per second

Answer

Error count: number of 5xx responses

Answer

Uptime: minutes service is up

Question 3

During an incident, the incident commander identifies a need to scale up a managed instance group. Which IAM role should be granted to the on-call engineer to allow them to modify the instance group?

Accepted Answer

roles/compute.instanceAdmin.v1. Compute Instance Admin (roles/compute.instanceAdmin.v1) allows full control over instances and instance groups, including modifying MIGs. Instance Admin (basic) is restricted. Compute Admin is broader but includes other resources. Security Admin does not have compute permissions.

Answer

roles/compute.admin

Answer

roles/compute.securityAdmin

Answer

roles/compute.instanceAdmin (basic)

Question 4

An engineer wants to automatically group similar error messages from an application and track trends, with the ability to link from an error to the corresponding log entries and trace. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Error Reporting. Error Reporting automatically groups errors, shows trends, and integrates with Cloud Logging and Cloud Trace for full context.

Answer

Cloud Logging with log-based metrics

Answer

Cloud Trace

Answer

Cloud Monitoring with custom dashboards

Question 5

A team wants to create a log-based metric that counts ERROR log entries grouped by the service name extracted from a JSON field. The log entries are structured JSON with a 'service' key. Which type of log-based metric should they create?

Accepted Answer

Counter metric with a label extracted from 'service' field. To count log entries and group by a label, a counter metric is appropriate. Distribution metrics are for histograms of numeric values, not counting.

Answer

Alerting policy with a condition on 'service' field

Answer

Gauge metric with the 'service' field as value

Answer

Distribution metric with a histogram of the 'service' field

Question 6

A DevOps engineer wants to create an alerting policy that fires when the 99th percentile of request latency exceeds 2000 ms for any 5-minute window. Which metric type and aggregation should they use?

Accepted Answer

Use a distribution metric with reducer 99th percentile. The 99th percentile is a distribution metric. Cloud Monitoring supports distribution metrics and can compute percentiles. The correct approach is to use a metric of type distribution with reducer set to 99th percentile.

Answer

Use a GAUGE metric with reducer MAX

Answer

Use a CUMULATIVE metric with reducer DELTA

Answer

Use a DELTA metric with reducer COUNT

Question 7

A DevOps engineer wants to monitor the CPU utilization of a Compute Engine instance and receive an alert if it exceeds 80% for more than 5 minutes. Which type of metric should be used in the alerting condition?

Accepted Answer

GAUGE

Answer

CUMULATIVE

Answer

DELTA

Answer

COUNT

Question 8

A company needs to store petabytes of time-series IoT sensor data and query it with single-digit millisecond latency at millions of reads per second. The data has a simple key-value structure with timestamps. Which Google Cloud database is MOST appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Bigtable. Cloud Bigtable is the correct choice because it is a fully managed, scalable NoSQL database designed for large analytical and operational workloads, such as time-series IoT sensor data. It supports petabyte-scale storage, single-digit millisecond latency for reads and writes, and millions of operations per second using a simple key-value model with timestamps, making it ideal for high-throughput, low-latency time-series data.

Answer

BigQuery

Answer

Firestore

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Question 9

An e-commerce platform uses Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL to manage orders. The application team reports that the database experiences performance degradation during peak hours due to high connection churn. They want to maintain a pool of established connections. Which configuration change addresses this without application code changes?

Accepted Answer

Enable the pgBouncer flag to use transaction pooling.. Enabling the pgBouncer flag in Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL provides a built-in connection pooler that maintains persistent connections to the database, reducing the overhead of frequent connection establishment. pgBouncer operates in transaction pooling mode, which allows multiple client connections to share a smaller pool of backend connections, directly addressing high connection churn without requiring any application code changes.

Answer

Reduce the max_connections flag to force the application to reuse connections.

Answer

Increase the max_connections flag to a higher value.

Answer

Switch to Cloud SQL for MySQL, which has built-in connection pooling.

Question 10

A team wants to use Cloud Profiler to identify CPU hot functions in a production service. Which TWO statements about Cloud Profiler are correct? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

It provides flame graphs to visualize function call stacks

Answer

It can profile only Java applications

Answer

It requires modifying application code to add profiling calls

Answer

It profiles all functions by default with no configuration

Question 11

An engineer is configuring an alerting policy for a latency metric. They want to reduce noise by requiring that the condition be met for at least 3 out of the last 5 alignment periods. Which settings must be adjusted? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Alignment period

Answer

Duration

Answer

Condition threshold

Question 12

Which Cloud Monitoring dashboard chart type is best suited to show the distribution of request latencies across multiple services over time?

Accepted Answer

Heatmap. Heatmap charts are ideal for showing distribution across two dimensions (e.g., service and time) with color intensity representing count or latency.

Answer

Scorecard

Answer

Line chart

Answer

Stacked bar chart

Question 13

A team is using OpenTelemetry to instrument their microservices and wants to export traces to Cloud Trace. They have deployed the OpenTelemetry Collector as a DaemonSet on GKE. What configuration is needed on the Collector to send traces to Cloud Trace?

Accepted Answer

Configure the 'googlecloud' exporter with a project ID and service account credentials.. The OpenTelemetry Collector needs an exporter configured for Google Cloud Trace. The 'googlecloud' exporter (or 'stackdriver' exporter) sends traces to Cloud Trace. The Collector must also have the appropriate IAM permissions (e.g., roles/cloudtrace.agent).

Answer

No configuration needed; the Collector automatically detects GKE and exports to Cloud Trace.

Answer

Configure the 'logging' exporter in the Collector to write traces to stdout, and use a sidecar to forward them.

Answer

Use the 'otlp' exporter to send traces to Cloud Trace's OTLP endpoint.

Question 14

You want to use Error Reporting to monitor exceptions in your application. Which TWO prerequisites must be met? (Select 2)

Accepted Answer

Enable Error Reporting API for the project.. Error Reporting requires that exceptions are logged to Cloud Logging with stack traces, and the service must be configured to write log entries with the appropriate format.

Answer

Use a supported language runtime.

Answer

Create a Pub/Sub topic for errors.

Answer

Install the Cloud Profiler agent.

Question 15

A company uses Cloud Profiler to identify performance bottlenecks. They notice that the CPU profile shows a function consuming high CPU, but they want to see the corresponding source code lines. What must they enable?

Accepted Answer

Enable debug symbols in the application build. Cloud Profiler can display source code locations if the application is built with debug symbols and the source code is available. For Google Cloud services, it automatically shows line numbers. For custom applications, you need to ensure the binary includes debug information (e.g., -g flag for Go, or pdb files for .NET). Profiler does not require OpenTelemetry, Flame graphs are a visualization, not a requirement, and sampling rate is unrelated.

Answer

Enable flame graphs in the Profiler settings

Answer

Instrument the application with OpenTelemetry SDK

Answer

Increase the Profiler sampling rate