Google ACE Practice Question: Which THREE are best practices for monitoring and…

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

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

• ✗

  Configure budget alerts in Cloud Billing to notify when costs exceed a threshold.

  Why it's wrong here

  Budget alerts in Cloud Billing only track spending against a monetary threshold and send notifications when costs are forecast to exceed or actually exceed that amount. They are financial guardrails, not operational monitoring signals, because they cannot detect error rates, latency, or service availability. Thus they fail to help troubleshoot or proactively manage the health of your workloads, making them incorrect for a monitoring and alerting best-practice question.

• ✓

  Use Cloud Audit Logs to monitor administrative actions and data access.

  Why this is correct

  Cloud Audit Logs are the authoritative record of who did what, when, and from where across your GCP resources. Admin Activity logs capture control-plane operations like creating or deleting resources, while Data Access logs capture reads and writes to user data, enabling security and compliance monitoring. Reviewing these logs and setting alerts for suspicious administrative actions or unusual data access is a core security monitoring best practice, because it provides the forensic detail needed to detect misuse or external attacks.

• ✗

  Enable VPC Flow Logs for all subnets to capture all network traffic metadata.

  Why it's wrong here

  Enabling VPC Flow Logs for all subnets generates enormous volumes of metadata and can lead to significant logging and storage costs, especially in high-traffic networks. Best practice is to enable flow logs selectively on critical subnets or VMs, and to tune sampling rate and aggregation interval to balance visibility against cost. Additionally, VPC Flow Logs only capture connection metadata, not full packet payloads, so they are a network diagnostics tool, not a comprehensive monitoring solution for every environment.

• ✓

  Set up alerts based on log-based metrics to detect specific error patterns.

  Why this is correct

  Log-based metrics let you derive counters, distributions, and Boolean metrics from Cloud Logging data, such as the count of a specific error string or the distribution of request latencies parsed from logs. By creating an alert policy on a log-based metric, you can detect specific error patterns in near-real time, such as a sudden spike in 500 responses or repeated authentication failures. This is a best practice because it turns raw logs into actionable operational signals and enables proactive incident response.

• ✓

  Use Cloud Monitoring to create uptime checks for external-facing services.

  Why this is correct

  Uptime checks in Cloud Monitoring periodically probe your external-facing HTTP/HTTPS endpoints from multiple global locations and verify that they respond with the expected status code and within a configured timeout. These checks track availability and latency over time, and alerting on them helps you detect service outages before users complain. This is a best practice for externally visible services because it is simple to set up and directly measures the user-facing health of your application.

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