PCDOE Timed Practice Test 3 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A team wants to implement multi-cluster monitoring for GKE using Managed Service for Prometheus. Which configuration is required?

Accepted Answer

Enable Managed Service for Prometheus in each cluster and configure a single Cloud Monitoring workspace to collect metrics from all clusters. Managed Service for Prometheus is a Google Cloud-managed, multi-cluster monitoring solution. To collect metrics from multiple GKE clusters, you must enable the service in each cluster individually and then configure a single Cloud Monitoring workspace to aggregate the data. This ensures each cluster runs its own collection pipeline, while the workspace provides a unified view across all clusters.

Answer

Enable Managed Service for Prometheus in one cluster and have other clusters forward metrics to it

Answer

Use Cloud Monitoring agent on nodes in each cluster

Answer

Set up a separate workspace per cluster

Question 2

A DevOps engineer needs to verify if a load balancer's health check is behaving normally by examining historical trends. Where should they look?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Monitoring Metrics Explorer. Cloud Monitoring Metrics Explorer is the correct place to examine historical trends of a load balancer's health check because it provides time-series metrics such as `https/backend_request_count`, `https/backend_latencies`, and health check probe success/failure counts. These metrics can be queried over custom time ranges and aggregated to detect anomalies or degradation patterns, which is exactly what the question asks for — verifying historical trends of health check behavior.

Answer

Cloud Logging

Answer

Cloud Console health check page

Answer

Cloud Load Balancing logs

Question 3

A team is using Cloud Monitoring to track the performance of a microservices application. They set up an uptime check for each service, but they notice that some checks are failing intermittently without actual service degradation. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The timeout setting is too short for the service's typical latency.. The most likely cause is that the timeout setting is too short, causing false positives when the service response time temporarily exceeds the timeout. Other options are less plausible: uptime checks typically run from multiple regions; load balancer 503 errors would indicate a real issue; quota exceed would prevent checks from running.

Answer

The services are behind a load balancer that occasionally returns 503 during scaling.

Answer

Uptime checks are deployed in a single region, causing false positives.

Answer

The project's quota for uptime checks has been exceeded.

Question 4

A DevSecOps team is configuring Cloud Monitoring alerts for proactive incident response. Which two practices are recommended for effective alerting? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Define clear escalation paths for different alert severities.. Recommended practices include defining clear escalation paths for different severities and creating separate alerts for different symptom classes to reduce noise and ensure proper routing.

Answer

Alert on every microsecond of latency increase.

Answer

Use a single high-level alert that covers all symptoms.

Answer

Set alert thresholds based on arbitrary guesses.

Question 5

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 offloads read traffic from the primary instance, improving read performance with minimal cost. Increasing vCPUs or storage incurs higher cost. Binary logging is for replication, not read performance.

Answer

Increase the number of vCPUs on the instance

Answer

Increase the storage size

Answer

Enable binary logging

Question 6

A financial services company uses Spanner for their core database. They notice that some transactions are taking longer than expected, especially during cross-region writes. They have set up Spanner with regional configuration. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The transaction is experiencing contention due to a hot spot. In a regional Spanner configuration, cross-region writes are not possible; hot spots (contention) are a common cause of latency. Stale reads are fast, and transaction size alone rarely causes significant delays.

Answer

The transaction is using stale reads

Answer

The transaction is not using a read-write transaction

Answer

The transaction is too large

Question 7

A company wants to reduce the response time of a globally distributed web application. Which Google Cloud service can cache static content at edge locations to improve performance?

Accepted Answer

Cloud CDN. Cloud CDN (Content Delivery Network) uses Google's globally distributed edge caches to serve static content (e.g., images, CSS, JavaScript) from locations closer to users, reducing latency and offloading origin servers. It integrates with external HTTPS load balancers to automatically cache responses based on cache-control headers, directly addressing the goal of improving response time for a globally distributed web application.

Answer

Cloud DNS

Answer

Cloud NAT

Answer

Cloud Armor

Question 8

A web application serves static assets (images, CSS, JavaScript) from Compute Engine instances. Users in different geographic regions report slow page loads. Which Google Cloud service can be used to improve performance for these users?

Accepted Answer

Cloud CDN. Cloud CDN (Content Delivery Network) caches static assets at Google's globally distributed edge points of presence (PoPs). When users request images, CSS, or JavaScript, the content is served from the nearest edge cache rather than the origin Compute Engine instances, reducing latency and improving page load times for geographically distributed users.

Answer

VPC Network Peering

Answer

Cloud Load Balancing

Answer

Cloud NAT

Question 9

A company is migrating a batch processing workload to Google Cloud. The workload is CPU-intensive and runs for a few hours each day. Which Compute Engine machine family should they choose to optimize performance and cost?

Accepted Answer

Compute-optimized (C2/C2D). A is correct because the workload is CPU-intensive and runs for a few hours each day, which is a sustained, compute-bound task. Compute-optimized machines (C2/C2D) are designed specifically for high-performance computing (HPC) and batch processing, offering the highest ratio of vCPU to memory and the fastest single-threaded performance on Google Cloud. This minimizes runtime and cost per job compared to general-purpose or burstable families.

Answer

Burstable (T2D)

Answer

GPU-accelerated (A2)

Answer

Memory-optimized (M2)

Question 10

A team is optimizing a Cloud Run service. Which two actions can reduce request latency? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Reduce container image size. Enabling min-instances reduces cold starts, and reducing container image size lowers startup time, both reducing latency.

Answer

Increase max-instances

Answer

Enable HTTP/2

Answer

Use a regional endpoint