PCDE Implementing Service Monitoring Strategies — 30 Questions

Question 1

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 2

An application running on GKE emits custom metrics via OpenTelemetry. The metrics need to be ingested into Cloud Monitoring and visualized in a dashboard. Which approach should the engineer use?

Accepted Answer

Install the OTel Collector as a DaemonSet and configure the Google Cloud Monitoring exporter.

Answer

Use the Cloud Monitoring API to directly ingest metrics from the application.

Answer

Configure the application to write logs in JSON format and create a log-based metric.

Answer

Use the Operations Agent on the node to scrape metrics from the application.

Question 3

Which Google Cloud service provides continuous, low-overhead profiling of CPU and memory usage to identify performance bottlenecks in production?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Profiler

Answer

Error Reporting

Answer

Cloud Monitoring

Answer

Cloud Trace

Question 4

A team needs to create an alert that triggers when the 99th percentile latency of a service exceeds 500ms for at least 10 minutes. Which alerting configuration is correct?

Accepted Answer

Metric threshold condition with alignment period 10 min, reducer PERCENTILE_99, based on 'latency' metric.

Answer

Absent condition with duration 10 min, based on 'latency' metric.

Answer

Metric threshold condition with alignment period 10 min, reducer MEAN, based on 'latency' metric.

Answer

Metric threshold condition with alignment period 10 min, reducer COUNT, based on 'latency' metric.

Question 5

An engineer wants to create a dashboard that shows the number of HTTP 5xx errors per minute from an application that writes structured logs. The application logs are in Cloud Logging. Which approach should be used?

Accepted Answer

Create a log-based metric with a counter for log entries containing '5xx' and use it in a dashboard.

Answer

Export logs to BigQuery and run a query every minute to count errors.

Answer

Use the Cloud Monitoring API to create a custom metric for error counts from logs.

Answer

Create an alert policy that triggers on error logs and counts them via a notification channel.

Question 6

Which notification channel is supported by Cloud Monitoring for alerting without additional third-party integrations?

Accepted Answer

Email

Answer

PagerDuty

Answer

Slack

Answer

SMS

Question 7

What is the primary purpose of including a runbook URL in an alert policy's documentation?

Accepted Answer

To give responders immediate access to troubleshooting steps and escalation procedures

Answer

To link to a dashboard that shows the alert's metric

Answer

To automatically trigger a Cloud Function when the alert fires

Answer

To provide a direct link to the source code repository

Question 8

A developer needs to manually instrument a Go application with distributed tracing and send traces to Cloud Trace. Which approach should they use?

Accepted Answer

Use the OpenTelemetry Go SDK and configure the Cloud Trace exporter.

Answer

Enable automatic instrumentation by adding a Cloud Trace agent to the application.

Answer

Write logs with trace IDs and use log-based metric to track traces.

Answer

Add trace statements using the Cloud Trace API directly.

Question 9

A company wants to visualize request latency distribution across all services using a heatmap. Which Cloud Monitoring chart type should be used?

Accepted Answer

Heatmap

Answer

Scorecard

Answer

Line chart

Answer

Stacked bar chart

Question 10

An application running on Cloud Run is automatically instrumented with Cloud Trace, but the trace sampling rate is too high, causing excessive costs. How can the engineer reduce the sampling rate?

Accepted Answer

Set the environment variable TRACE_SAMPLE_RATE to a value between 0 and 1.

Answer

Disable Cloud Trace and use only Cloud Monitoring metrics.

Answer

Modify the Cloud Trace API quota to limit trace ingestion.

Answer

Configure the trace sampling rate in the Cloud Monitoring alert policy.

Question 11

Which of the following is a key benefit of using structured logging in Cloud Logging?

Accepted Answer

It enables automatic parsing of log fields for easier querying and correlation with traces.

Answer

It reduces log storage costs by compressing data.

Answer

It automatically creates log-based metrics from the log entries.

Answer

It allows logs to be shipped to BigQuery in real-time.

Question 12

A DevOps team wants to alert when a Compute Engine instance is unreachable for 5 minutes. Which alerting condition type should be used?

Accepted Answer

Absent condition

Answer

Metric threshold condition

Answer

Logs-based alerting

Answer

Forecast condition

Question 13

A company is designing a monitoring strategy for a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine. They need to capture traces, metrics, and logs using a vendor-neutral approach. Which TWO components should they consider? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

OpenTelemetry Collector as a DaemonSet

Answer

Cloud Logging agent

Answer

Stackdriver agents on each node

Answer

Cloud Trace automatic instrumentation

Question 14

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 15

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 16

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 17

An application running on GKE needs to send custom metrics to Cloud Monitoring. The team wants to use a vendor-neutral instrumentation approach that also supports traces and logs. Which solution should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Use OpenTelemetry SDK and OTel Collector to export to Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Trace. OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral standard for observability (metrics, traces, logs). The OpenTelemetry Collector can run as a DaemonSet on GKE and export data to Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Trace.

Answer

Use the Cloud Monitoring API directly from the application to write metrics

Answer

Use Prometheus client library and scrape metrics with Managed Service for Prometheus

Answer

Use the Stackdriver Monitoring client library

Question 18

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 19

A company uses Cloud Logging and wants to receive real-time notifications when the number of 5xx errors exceeds 100 per minute. They need to set up an alerting policy. Which metric type and condition should they use?

Accepted Answer

Create a log-based counter metric and use a metric-threshold condition with rate alignment. A log-based counter metric can count errors per minute. The alert condition should be 'metric threshold' with 'CUMULATIVE' metric and 'rate' alignment to detect spikes.

Answer

Create a log-based counter metric and use a metric-absent condition

Answer

Use a Cloud Monitoring gauge metric with a custom value

Answer

Use a logs-based alert with a threshold on the log entry count

Question 20

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