Google ACE Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution Practice Question
A user wants to estimate the monthly cost of running a Compute Engine VM with 8 vCPUs, 32 GB of memory, and a 100 GB persistent disk in us-central1 for one year. They plan to use the VM 24/7. Which tool should they use?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
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Google Cloud Pricing Calculator
The Google Cloud Pricing Calculator allows users to estimate costs for GCP services, including Compute Engine instances with specific machine types, persistent disks, and usage duration.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Google Cloud Pricing Calculator
Why this is correct
The Google Cloud Pricing Calculator is the correct tool for estimating monthly costs before deployment. You can select specific Google Cloud products and configure parameters such as region, VM machine type, RAM, storage class, and committed usage discounts to generate a projected total. It accepts hypothetical inputs and even provides a machine configurator for GKE and Compute Engine, producing a line-itemized estimate suitable for budgeting and capacity planning.
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Cloud Asset Inventory
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Asset Inventory is a metadata service that captures the complete resource hierarchy and configuration state of your GCP environment, including histories and IAM policies. While it is invaluable for governance, change detection, and security audits, it does not contain pricing information or perform any cost calculations. Its exported asset lists could be used as a starting point for a manual cost exercise, but the service itself cannot estimate the monthly bill for a proposed configuration.
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Cloud Billing reports
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Billing reports reflect actual spending after resources have been used, drawing from billing accounts and aggregated into cost tables and dashboards. They answer questions like 'what did we spend last month?' or 'which service drove costs?' but cannot model a hypothetical configuration because no usage has been incurred yet. To project a future or alternative setup, you need the Pricing Calculator, not historical billing data.
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Cloud Monitoring
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Monitoring collects and analyzes telemetry such as CPU utilization, request latency, and uptime from your infrastructure and applications. Although it can trigger alerts and display dashboards, it has no awareness of pricing, pricing units, or billing metadata, so it cannot produce a monetary estimate. Its purpose is operational observability, not financial planning.
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Google Cloud Platform Overview
Key term
Google Cloud
Google Cloud is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides infrastructure, platform, and software solutions over the internet.
Key term
Compute Engine
Compute Engine is Google Cloud's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google's infrastructure.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This ACE practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the ACE exam.