Google ACE Practice Question: Ensuring Successful Operation of a Cloud Solution
An engineer needs to monitor the external HTTP availability of a web application hosted on Compute Engine. Which Cloud Monitoring feature 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
✓
Uptime check
Uptime checks are designed to verify that a resource is accessible and measure response latency from various locations. They can check HTTP/HTTPS/TCP endpoints.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Uptime check
Why this is correct
An uptime check is a Cloud Monitoring synthetic probe that periodically sends an HTTP(S) request to the specified URL from configurable global locations. It validates availability by checking for expected HTTP status codes, response time thresholds, and optional content matches, and it emits metrics such as uptime, latency, and check success. This is the correct choice because it actively measures external HTTP reachability from outside the network, which is exactly what is needed to monitor external availability.
- ✗
Dashboard
Why it's wrong here
A Dashboard in Cloud Monitoring is a read-only visualization layer that aggregates existing time-series data and widgets. It does not actively probe or generate data, so it cannot verify whether an external HTTP endpoint is reachable from outside the network. Dashboards only help you view metrics that something else has already collected, which makes them a display tool rather than a monitoring mechanism for external availability.
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Metric Explorer
Why it's wrong here
Metric Explorer is an interactive tool for querying and plotting metrics already stored in Cloud Monitoring, such as compute instance utilization or uptime check results. It cannot initiate external HTTP requests or create synthetic traffic, because it lacks any probe execution engine. Thus it is unsuitable for measuring external HTTP availability on its own; it could only be used later to examine data produced by a configured uptime check.
- ✗
Log-based alert
Why it's wrong here
A log-based alert evaluates log entries against a filter and triggers notifications when matching entries appear. It relies on the application or infrastructure to generate logs for each request, meaning it is passive and dependent on actual user traffic or application-side logging. If the external service is unreachable and no users are sending requests, no relevant logs may be produced, so a log-based alert cannot reliably detect an external HTTP availability outage without an active synthetic request.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Google Cloud Platform Overview
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.
Key term
Alerting policy
An alerting policy is a set of rules that defines when to send notifications about a system condition that needs attention.
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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.