Google ACE Practice Question: Ensuring Successful Operation of a Cloud Solution
An engineer needs to create an alerting policy in Cloud Monitoring that sends a notification when the 99th percentile latency of a service exceeds 500 ms for 5 minutes. Which metric type 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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Metric threshold
A metric threshold alert uses a numeric metric and triggers when the value crosses a threshold. Log-based alerts are for when a specific log entry appears. Uptime checks monitor availability, not latency percentiles.
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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Metric threshold
Why this is correct
Metric threshold is the standard condition type used in a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy. It evaluates a metric stream (e.g., Compute Engine CPU utilization, disk bytes used) against a numeric threshold over a specified aggregation window, triggering notifications when the value crosses the threshold. This is the correct answer because it directly defines the alerting condition that the engineer needs.
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Log-based metric
Why it's wrong here
A log-based metric is a user-defined metric extracted from log entries via filter expressions, such as counting errors from a specific service. It is not an alerting condition type; rather, it acts as the metric source that can be referenced inside a metric-threshold condition. Thus, an alerting policy cannot be created with a log-based metric alone—it must be combined with a threshold condition.
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Uptime check
Why it's wrong here
An uptime check is a monitoring resource that probes the availability and latency of a public endpoint (HTTP/S, TCP, etc.) from multiple locations. While Cloud Monitoring supports an 'Uptime Check Health' condition type for alerting, the correct answer for a general alerting policy condition is metric threshold. Uptime checks are specific to availability testing, not generic metric-based alerting, making this option incorrect.
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Cloud Audit Logs
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Audit Logs provide a record of administrative actions (Admin Activity, Data Access, etc.) for compliance and security auditing. They are not a condition type for alerting policies; to alert on audit logs, you must first convert them into a log-based metric or use a log-match condition. Therefore, Cloud Audit Logs themselves cannot be used directly to create an alerting policy.
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Google Cloud Platform Overview
Key term
Service
A service is a software component or system that performs a specific function and is available to be used by other programs or users over a network.
Key term
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud monitoring is the process of observing, measuring, and managing an organization's cloud infrastructure and applications to ensure performance, availability, and security.
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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.