PCDOE Practice Test 3 — 10 Questions

Question 1

Which THREE are recommended practices for setting up alerting on Google Cloud?

Accepted Answer

Set alert thresholds with a buffer (e.g., below SLO). Setting alert thresholds with a buffer below the SLO (e.g., alert at 99.9% when SLO is 99.99%) provides early warning before the SLO is breached. This proactive approach allows time for investigation and remediation, preventing actual SLO violations and ensuring service reliability targets are met.

Answer

Use multiple conditions with OR combiner to cover all scenarios

Answer

Use a single alerting policy for all services

Question 2

Based on the exhibit, what does the duration of 300s mean in this alerting policy?

Accepted Answer

The alert fires if CPU utilization is above 80% for at least 5 consecutive minutes.. In the Google Cloud Monitoring alerting policy shown in the exhibit, the duration of 300s (5 minutes) defines the minimum period during which the CPU utilization must continuously exceed the 80% threshold before the alert fires. This prevents transient spikes from triggering unnecessary alerts. Option A correctly states that the alert fires only if CPU utilization is above 80% for at least 5 consecutive minutes, matching the policy's configuration.

Answer

The alert fires after 300 seconds of sustained CPU utilization above 80% with a count of 1.

Answer

The alert fires if CPU utilization averaged over 5 minutes exceeds 80%.

Answer

The alert fires if CPU utilization is above 80% for any 5-minute window in the last hour.

Question 3

A service is deployed on Cloud Run. You need to monitor memory usage per revision. How can you create an alert?

Accepted Answer

Configure Cloud Run to send metrics to Cloud Monitoring and create an alert in Cloud Monitoring. Cloud Run automatically exports built-in metrics, including memory usage per revision, to Cloud Monitoring without any additional configuration. By creating an alerting policy in Cloud Monitoring based on the `run.googleapis.com/container/memory/utilizations` metric, you can monitor memory usage per revision directly. Option B correctly identifies this native integration, making it the most efficient and reliable approach.

Answer

Deploy a sidecar container that collects memory metrics and pushes to Cloud Monitoring

Answer

Use Cloud Console and navigate to Cloud Run services to set an alert directly

Answer

Use Cloud Logging to parse container logs for memory usage

Question 4

A team needs to monitor the availability of an HTTPS endpoint that requires a Bearer token in the request header. What is the simplest way to configure this with Cloud Monitoring?

Accepted Answer

Configure the Uptime Check to include a custom header with the Bearer token.. Cloud Monitoring's Uptime Checks natively support custom HTTP headers, including Authorization headers with Bearer tokens. This allows you to directly monitor an authenticated HTTPS endpoint without any additional infrastructure, scripting, or log-based workarounds. It is the simplest and most straightforward configuration for this requirement.

Answer

Deploy a sidecar container that handles the authentication and exposes a plain endpoint.

Answer

Use a synthetic monitor from Cloud Monitoring that handles authentication via a script.

Answer

Export the endpoint logs to Cloud Logging and set up a log-based metric for availability.

Question 5

A startup runs a web application on GKE. They notice that during traffic spikes, the application becomes unresponsive, and they want to automatically scale the number of pods based on CPU utilization. Which Kubernetes resource should they use?

Accepted Answer

Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA). The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) is designed to automatically scale the number of pods in a deployment based on metrics like CPU utilization. It directly addresses the need to handle traffic spikes by adding more replicas when demand increases, ensuring the application remains responsive.

Answer

Pod Disruption Budget (PDB)

Answer

Cluster Autoscaler

Answer

Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA)

Question 6

A team wants to ensure zero-downtime deployments for a Cloud Run service. They plan to gradually shift traffic from the current revision to the new one. What should they configure?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Run's traffic splitting feature to slowly increase traffic to the new revision. Cloud Run natively supports traffic splitting between revisions, allowing you to gradually shift a percentage of traffic to a new revision while the old revision continues serving the remainder. This enables canary or gradual rollouts with zero downtime, and you can adjust percentages incrementally via multiple updates until the new revision reaches 100%.

Answer

Use Cloud Build to directly replace the revision

Answer

Set traffic to 100% on the new revision gradually using multiple updates

Answer

Configure a rolling update strategy in Cloud Deploy

Question 7

Refer to the exhibit.

```yaml
name: projects/my-project/alertPolicies/12345
displayName: High Error Rate
combiner: OR
conditions:
- conditionThreshold:
    filter: metric.type="logging.googleapis.com/user/myapp/error_count" resource.type="k8s_container"
    aggregations:
    - alignmentPeriod: 60s
      perSeriesAligner: ALIGN_RATE
    duration: 120s
    comparison: COMPARISON_GT
    thresholdValue: 5
    trigger:
      count: 1
```

An engineer notices that this alert fires too frequently during normal operation. Which change would most likely reduce the noise?

Accepted Answer

Increase duration to 300s.. Increasing the duration to 300s means the condition (error rate > 5 per second) must be sustained for a full 5 minutes before the alert fires. This reduces noise by filtering out transient spikes that occur during normal operation, which are shorter than the new duration window. The original 120s duration allowed short-lived bursts to trigger the alert too frequently.

Answer

Change combiner to AND.

Answer

Change perSeriesAligner to ALIGN_MEAN.

Answer

Decrease thresholdValue to 1.

Question 8

A DevOps team wants to serve static content from a Cloud Storage bucket with low latency globally. They also need TLS termination. Which load balancer type should they use?

Accepted Answer

External HTTP(S) Load Balancer. External HTTP(S) Load Balancer is the correct choice because it provides global anycast IP addresses, TLS termination at the Google Front End (GFE), and integrates directly with Cloud Storage buckets as a backend. This enables low-latency content delivery worldwide while offloading SSL decryption to the load balancer.

Answer

External Network Load Balancer

Answer

SSL Proxy Load Balancer

Answer

Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancer

Question 9

A Cloud Run service experiences high latency during cold starts. The service is memory-intensive. Which configuration change will most effectively reduce cold start latency?

Accepted Answer

Set a minimum number of instances.. Setting a minimum number of instances ensures that a baseline of pre-warmed instances is always running, eliminating cold starts for the initial requests. For a memory-intensive service, this avoids the latency penalty of loading large libraries or datasets into memory on first invocation. This is the most direct and effective configuration change to reduce cold start latency.

Answer

Decrease the container concurrency setting.

Answer

Increase the max instances limit.

Answer

Enable CPU boost for the service.

Question 10

An e-commerce platform uses Cloud SQL for its database. The team notices that read queries are slow. They want to improve read performance without significant cost increase. Which action should they take?

Accepted Answer

Add a read replica. Adding a read replica is the most cost-effective way to improve read query performance in Cloud SQL. A read replica offloads SELECT queries from the primary instance, reducing contention and latency for read-heavy workloads, without requiring a more expensive primary instance. This approach scales read capacity horizontally while keeping the primary instance's compute and storage unchanged.

Answer

Increase the number of vCPUs on the instance

Answer

Increase the storage size

Answer

Enable binary logging