PCDE Practice Test 41 — 15 Questions

Question 1

What is the purpose of a Google Cloud organization node in the resource hierarchy?

Accepted Answer

It is the root node in the GCP resource hierarchy for centralized policy and billing management.. The organization node is the root resource. It allows centralized management of policies, roles, and billing across all folders and projects. It is required for organization-level IAM and organization policies.

Answer

It is used to group billing accounts.

Answer

It is an alias for a project.

Answer

It represents a team within a company.

Question 2

Which Google Cloud service can be used to automate repetitive operational tasks such as restarting a VM or clearing a cache, as part of toil reduction?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions. Cloud Functions is a serverless execution environment that can be triggered by events or schedules to automate tasks. It is well-suited for automating simple operational tasks.

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

Cloud Run

Answer

Cloud Build

Question 3

An engineer wants to automatically build a Docker image in Cloud Build whenever code is pushed to the main branch of a repository. Which configuration is correct?

Accepted Answer

Create a Cloud Build trigger with event 'push', source 'repository', branch filter '^main$'. The `push` trigger with a branch filter for `main` ensures builds are triggered on pushes to the main branch.

Answer

Create a Cloud Build trigger with event 'pull_request', source 'repository', branch filter 'main'

Answer

Create a Cloud Build trigger with event 'push', source 'repository', branch filter '.*'

Answer

Create a Cloud Build trigger with event 'manual', source 'repository', branch filter 'main'

Question 4

An organization wants to monitor a batch processing job that runs daily on Compute Engine. They need to be alerted if the job fails to produce output within 24 hours. Which THREE components should they use? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Create a log-based counter metric that increments upon job completion. A log-based metric counting success messages, an alert with metric-absent condition, and a notification channel. The metric-absent condition fires when the metric stops reporting (i.e., no success log within 24h).

Answer

Create a Cloud Monitoring dashboard to visualize the metric

Answer

Use Cloud Trace to trace the job execution

Question 5

Your organization mandates that all application logs must be structured JSON and include a trace ID for correlation with Cloud Trace. Developers are using various logging libraries. Which approach ensures consistent structured logging across all services with minimal code changes?

Accepted Answer

Adopt OpenTelemetry SDK and use its logging API to produce structured logs with trace context.. The OpenTelemetry SDK provides a unified way to instrument logging, metrics, and traces. By using the OTel logging SDK, developers can emit structured logs that include trace context automatically. This ensures consistency across polyglot environments without requiring custom code.

Answer

Use a centralized logging agent (e.g., Fluentd) to parse unstructured logs and add trace IDs.

Answer

Require developers to manually format JSON logs and include trace IDs from environment variables.

Answer

Use Cloud Logging's automatic trace ID extraction from log entries.

Question 6

A site reliability engineer defines a service's availability SLI as the percentage of successful requests. Which of the following is the correct formula for this SLI?

Accepted Answer

good-request-count / valid-request-count * 100. Availability SLI is typically defined as the count of successful requests divided by total valid requests, measured over a rolling window.

Answer

good-request-count / total-requests (including invalid) * 100

Answer

error-request-count / valid-request-count * 100

Answer

valid-request-count / error-request-count * 100

Question 7

A team is conducting a blameless postmortem after a production incident. Which three actions are part of an effective blameless postmortem process? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Define action items with specific owners and due dates. Blameless postmortems focus on identifying contributing factors, using techniques like 5 Whys, and defining action items with owners. Assigning blame, punishing, or ignoring minor factors are not part of the process.

Answer

Assign blame to the individual who made the error

Answer

Punish the on-call engineer for missing the alert

Question 8

A team wants to implement chaos engineering on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to test resilience against pod failures. Which tool is designed for injecting faults into GKE clusters?

Accepted Answer

Chaos Mesh on GKE. Chaos Mesh is an open-source chaos engineering platform for Kubernetes, including GKE. It can inject pod failures, network delays, etc. Traffic Director fault injection is for service mesh, not GKE-native.

Answer

GKE Node Auto-Repair

Answer

Traffic Director fault injection

Answer

Cloud Armor

Question 9

An application is emitting structured JSON logs that include a 'request_id' field used for correlation. The team wants to enable log correlation with Cloud Trace so they can navigate from a log entry to its trace. What must they include in the log entry?

Accepted Answer

The trace ID in a field named 'trace' in the JSON payload. Cloud Logging automatically correlates logs with traces when the log entry contains the trace field with the correct format.

Answer

A logging label with key 'trace' and value set to the trace ID

Answer

The span ID in a field named 'span'

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The request ID in a field named 'request_id'

Question 10

During an incident, the incident commander decides to escalate to a higher severity level. Which of the following best describes the incident commander's primary responsibility?

Accepted Answer

Managing the incident response process and communications. The incident commander is responsible for coordinating response, communication, and prioritization, not necessarily fixing the issue.

Answer

Debugging the root cause of the incident

Answer

Writing the postmortem document

Answer

Implementing the fix

Question 11

A team uses Cloud Monitoring to create an SLO for a request-based service. They want to alert when the error budget burn rate exceeds 14x the budget for a short window. Which alert type and window should they configure?

Accepted Answer

Fast burn alert with a 1-hour window.. A fast burn alert fires when the burn rate is very high over a short window (1 hour). 14x burn rate means the entire budget would be consumed in ~1/14 of the SLO window. The correct configuration is a fast burn alert with a 1-hour window.

Answer

Slow burn alert with a 6-hour window.

Answer

Fast burn alert with a 6-hour window.

Answer

Slow burn alert with a 1-hour window.

Question 12

A team uses Cloud Monitoring SLO monitoring with a request-based SLI for availability. They define good requests as those returning HTTP 200. Which configuration correctly creates this SLO?

Accepted Answer

good-request-count = successful requests, valid-request-count = total requests. For request-based SLO, define good-request-count as the number of successful requests and valid-request-count as total requests. Cloud Monitoring uses these metrics.

Answer

good-request-count = requests with latency < 500ms, valid-request-count = total requests

Answer

good-request-count = total requests, valid-request-count = successful requests

Answer

good-request-count = 200 responses, valid-request-count = 400+500 responses

Question 13

Which THREE are key principles of a blameless postmortem culture in SRE? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Creating action items with owners and due dates. Blameless postmortems focus on systemic improvements, not individual blame. They involve documenting contributing factors, creating action items with owners and dates, and fostering a culture of learning. Assigning blame is avoided.

Answer

Ensuring incidents are never discussed outside the team

Answer

Assigning responsibility to individuals for errors

Question 14

A team is automating toil reduction and needs to identify tasks that qualify as toil. Which of the following is a defining characteristic of toil according to SRE principles?

Accepted Answer

Work that has no enduring value. Toil is work that is manual, repetitive, automatable, has no enduring value, and scales linearly with service growth. One key characteristic is that it provides no enduring value; if the task were not done, the service would not suffer long-term loss.

Answer

Work that requires deep domain expertise

Answer

Work that is performed by junior engineers only

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Work that is critical to business operations

Question 15

An application running on GKE uses OpenTelemetry for instrumentation. You need to export traces to Cloud Trace and custom metrics to Cloud Monitoring. Which approach is most efficient?

Accepted Answer

Use the OpenTelemetry Collector to receive OTLP data and export to Cloud Trace and Cloud Monitoring. The OpenTelemetry Collector can receive OTLP data from the application and export to multiple backends. Using the Collector as a sidecar or daemonset reduces overhead and provides buffering. Direct export from the SDK increases complexity and resource usage.

Answer

Write a custom exporter in the application that sends data to both services

Answer

Export traces to Cloud Trace via Stackdriver Trace exporter and metrics to Cloud Monitoring via Stackdriver Metrics exporter in the SDK

Answer

Configure the OpenTelemetry SDK to export directly to Cloud Trace and Cloud Monitoring endpoints