Google ACE Practice Question: Ensuring Successful Operation of a Cloud Solution

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✓

  The sink's inclusion filter is too restrictive

  Why this is correct

  This is the correct diagnostic. A log sink only forwards entries that match its inclusion filter, and an overly narrow filter—such as one restricted to a single resource type or severity level—will silently exclude the rest of the log stream before it reaches BigQuery. Check the sink's filter in the Logs Explorer to confirm it matches the actual log entries you expect to export, and note that any exclusion filters are applied after the inclusion filter and can further reduce the data routed.

• ✗

  Logs older than 30 days cannot be exported

  Why it's wrong here

  This is incorrect because logs are exportable as long as they still exist in Cloud Logging; the 30-day retention applies only to certain log types and does not impose a deadline on creating a sink. You can create a sink at any time and it will backfill and export any logs that are still within the retention window, whether they are one day old or 29 days old. The only time age matters is when logs have already been deleted by retention, so this would not explain missing logs unless the logs had already aged out.

• ✗

  The sink's destination is a table, not a dataset

  Why it's wrong here

  This is not the reason the logs are missing. For a BigQuery sink, the destination must be a dataset, not a table—Cloud Logging automatically creates and manages tables within that dataset, including partitioning and schema updates. If the destination were mistakenly set to a table, sink creation would fail immediately, so this would be a configuration error caught at setup time, not an intermittent or silent loss of logs after deployment.

• ✗

  BigQuery dataset is in a different region

  Why it's wrong here

  This is a red herring. Cloud Logging sinks support exporting to BigQuery datasets located in any region, including multi-regional locations, without any requirement that they match the region of the Cloud Logging storage. Cross-region exports may incur additional network egress costs, but the sink will still deliver logs successfully. Therefore, a regional mismatch alone cannot cause logs to be absent from the BigQuery dataset.

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