PCDOE Timed Practice Test 5 — 10 Questions

Question 1

An e-commerce platform is using Cloud Load Balancing with a backend service that has a custom health check. The health check is failing intermittently, causing traffic to be routed away from healthy instances. The team has enabled Cloud Logging and wants to diagnose the issue. Which log view should they examine to see the health check probe results?

Accepted Answer

Load balancer logs (type: 'loadbalancing.googleapis.com'). Load balancer logs (type: 'loadbalancing.googleapis.com') contain detailed records of health check probes, including the probe source IP, target instance, response code, and latency. This is the exact log view that captures health check probe results, enabling the team to identify intermittent failures by correlating probe timestamps with instance health status changes.

Answer

VPC flow logs

Answer

Cloud Audit Logs (Admin Activity)

Answer

Instance serial port output logs

Question 2

When bootstrapping a Google Cloud organization for DevOps, which THREE steps are essential to set up a secure CI/CD foundation using Cloud Build?

Accepted Answer

Create a Cloud Source Repository for each application's code.. Creating a Cloud Source Repository for each application's code is essential because it provides a dedicated, version-controlled repository that integrates natively with Cloud Build triggers. This ensures that each application has its own isolated codebase, enabling precise CI/CD pipelines without cross-application interference.

Answer

Disable default service accounts in all projects.

Answer

Configure VPC Service Controls for all projects.

Question 3

Refer to the exhibit. The output shows three folders created directly under the organization node. Which gcloud command was most likely executed to produce this output?

Accepted Answer

gcloud resource-manager folders list --organization=123456789012. Option A is correct because the `gcloud resource-manager folders list --organization=123456789012` command lists all folders directly under the specified organization node. The output shows three folders (e.g., folder1, folder2, folder3) at the top level, which matches the behavior of listing folders with the organization ID as the parent. This command is specifically designed to retrieve immediate child folders of an organization, not nested folders.

Answer

gcloud organizations list

Answer

gcloud projects list --filter='parent.id:123456789012'

Answer

gcloud resource-manager folders list --folder=123456789012

Question 4

Which TWO are valid methods to manage service account keys securely? (Select exactly 2)

Accepted Answer

Automate key rotation using a Cloud Function.. Option B is correct because automating key rotation with a Cloud Function ensures service account keys are rotated on a schedule without manual intervention, reducing the risk of key exposure. This aligns with Google Cloud's best practices for key management, as it enforces rotation policies programmatically and can integrate with Secret Manager to securely store and version keys.

Answer

Rotate keys manually every 90 days.

Answer

Embed keys in application code.

Answer

Store keys in Cloud Storage with public access.

Question 5

Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer tries to create a project but gets this error. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The organization has an organizational policy that restricts project creation.. The error message indicates that project creation is blocked by an organizational policy. In Google Cloud, organization policies (e.g., constraints/compute.restrictNonCcmlProjects) can be set at the organization or folder level to restrict project creation. This is a common control for governance and cost management, and it overrides individual user permissions.

Answer

The project ID already exists.

Answer

The user's billing account is not linked.

Answer

The user does not have the Project Creator role.

Question 6

Which THREE steps are typically part of a formal incident postmortem according to Google SRE best practices?

Accepted Answer

Assign action items with deadlines.. Option B is correct because Google SRE postmortems emphasize creating actionable follow-ups to prevent recurrence. Assigning action items with deadlines ensures that identified issues are systematically addressed, which is a core principle of blameless postmortems focused on process improvement rather than punishment.

Answer

Identify the person responsible for the incident.

Answer

Implement a solution immediately.

Question 7

A company uses Error Budgets for their service. The SLO is 99.9% availability over a 30-day window. The service has been down for 30 minutes in the current window. What is the remaining error budget?

Accepted Answer

13.2 minutes. The SLO of 99.9% over a 30-day window allows a total error budget of 43.2 minutes (30 days × 24 hours × 60 minutes × 0.001). The service has already consumed 30 minutes of downtime, so the remaining error budget is 43.2 - 30 = 13.2 minutes. Option C is correct because it reflects this precise calculation.

Answer

43.2 minutes

Answer

60 minutes

Answer

30 minutes

Question 8

A team has configured an uptime check with a 5xx threshold alert. During an incident, the alert fires with severity 'critical'. The team mitigates the issue, but the alert keeps firing for 15 more minutes due to a slow-responding downstream dependency. What should the team do to avoid false alarms in future incidents?

Accepted Answer

Increase the 'duration' field in the alerting policy to require the condition to be true for a longer time before alerting.. Option B is correct because increasing the 'duration' field in the alerting policy ensures that the condition (e.g., 5xx errors) must persist for a longer, defined period before the alert fires. This prevents false alarms from transient issues like a slow-responding downstream dependency that temporarily triggers the threshold but resolves before the alert duration expires. In Google Cloud Monitoring, the duration parameter specifies the minimum time the condition must be true, filtering out short-lived spikes.

Answer

Add a second notification channel to send alerts to a different team.

Answer

Modify the alert condition to check only for 5xx errors and ignore other status codes.

Answer

Decrease the check frequency to every 30 seconds to get faster feedback.

Question 9

Which TWO of the following are best practices for managing incident response on Google Cloud?

Accepted Answer

Establish a clear escalation path and ensure that on-call engineers are aware of their roles.. Option B is correct because a clear escalation path with defined roles ensures that on-call engineers know exactly whom to contact for different severity levels, reducing response time and preventing miscommunication. Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) supports structured escalation policies through alerting channels and notification routing, making this a foundational best practice for incident management.

Answer

Automatically escalate all incidents to the engineering manager.

Answer

Assign only one engineer to be on call to reduce confusion.

Answer

Use only one notification channel (e.g., email) to keep the team focused.

Question 10

An engineer wants to ensure that an alert is escalated if not acknowledged within 5 minutes. Which feature of Cloud Monitoring can achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Notification channel with escalation configuration.. Notification channels in Google Cloud Monitoring can be configured with an escalation policy that defines a sequence of recipients or notification methods to be contacted if an alert is not acknowledged within a specified time. By setting the escalation duration to 5 minutes, the system automatically escalates the alert to the next tier or channel if no acknowledgment is received, directly meeting the engineer's requirement.

Answer

Incident management tool like PagerDuty.

Answer

Using a webhook notification channel.

Answer

Alerting policy with a condition that checks for acknowledgment.