Google ACE Practice Question: Ensuring Successful Operation of a Cloud Solution
You are responsible for monitoring a set of Compute Engine instances that run a critical web application. You want to be alerted when the average CPU utilization across all instances exceeds 80% for more than 5 minutes. You also want to receive a notification via email and SMS. Which TWO actions should you take? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is thinking that the Cloud Monitoring agent is needed for CPU metrics, when CPU is a built-in metric; also confusing log-based alerts with metric alerts.
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
✓
Configure a notification channel for email and SMS in Cloud Monitoring and attach it to the alerting policy.
To alert on CPU utilization, you need a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy with a condition on the CPU metric, and you must attach notification channels for email and SMS. The Monitoring agent is not required for CPU metrics, log-based alerts are for logs, and uptime checks are for availability, not resource metrics.
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 a notification channel for email and SMS in Cloud Monitoring and attach it to the alerting policy.
Why this is correct
This is correct because Cloud Monitoring supports notification channels for email, SMS, and other services. To receive alerts via email and SMS, you must create those channels and associate them with the alerting policy. Without notification channels, the alert would trigger but no notifications would be sent.
- ✗
Create a log-based alert in Cloud Logging that triggers when CPU utilization exceeds 80%.
Why it's wrong here
Log-based alerts are used for log entries, not metrics. CPU utilization is a metric, not a log. While you could potentially create a log entry from a metric, it is not the direct or recommended approach. Cloud Monitoring alerting policies are the correct tool for metric-based alerts.
- ✓
Create a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy with a condition on the CPU utilization metric, setting the threshold to 80% and the duration to 5 minutes.
Why this is correct
This is correct because Cloud Monitoring alerting policies allow you to define conditions based on metrics. You can set a threshold on CPU utilization and specify a duration for how long the condition must be met before triggering an alert. This directly addresses the requirement to alert when average CPU exceeds 80% for more than 5 minutes.
- ✗
Install the Cloud Monitoring agent on each instance to collect CPU utilization metrics.
Why it's wrong here
The Cloud Monitoring agent is used to collect additional metrics like memory and disk usage, but CPU utilization is a built-in metric provided by the Compute Engine hypervisor. The agent is not required for CPU metrics. Installing it would not hurt but is unnecessary for this specific requirement.
- ✗
Set up an uptime check to monitor the CPU utilization of the instances.
Why it's wrong here
Uptime checks are used to monitor the availability and latency of services from external locations. They do not monitor CPU utilization. Uptime checks send requests to endpoints and verify responses; they are not designed for resource metric monitoring. This would not fulfill the requirement.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Cloud Monitoring and Uptime Checks
Key term
Availability
Availability is the measure of how often a system or service is operational and accessible when needed, typically expressed as a percentage of uptime.
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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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Google Cloud exam blueprint
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.