Google ACE Practice Question: Ensuring Successful Operation of a Cloud Solution
You need to alert when the CPU utilization of your Compute Engine instance exceeds 80% for 5 minutes. What should you create in Cloud Monitoring?
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
✓
A metric threshold alerting policy
A metric threshold alerting policy triggers when a metric crosses a threshold for a specified 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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An uptime check
Why it's wrong here
Uptime checks are synthetic probes that test whether an external endpoint (HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP) is reachable and responding. They do not collect or evaluate the Compute Engine instance's CPU utilization metric; they only measure availability and responsiveness from outside. Thus, an uptime check cannot trigger an alert based on CPU percentage.
- ✓
A metric threshold alerting policy
Why this is correct
In Cloud Monitoring, you create an alerting policy with a condition that uses a threshold for a metric such as 'compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization'. The policy samples the metric stream over an alignment period and triggers when the value (e.g., average CPU utilization) crosses the threshold for a specified duration. This is exactly the native mechanism for CPU utilization alerts.
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A log-based alert
Why it's wrong here
Log-based alerts are created from Logging filters that match specific log entries, such as error messages or audit logs. CPU utilization is a numeric metric series, not a log entry; although you could use the Logging agent to write custom log entries that include CPU stats, that approach is indirect, introduces parsing and latency, and is not the designed method for metric threshold alerting. Therefore a log-based alert is the wrong choice.
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A dashboard chart
Why it's wrong here
A dashboard is a read-only view in Cloud Monitoring that displays charts and tables of metric data for human analysis. While a chart can be configured to show CPU utilization, it is purely a visualization and has no evaluation engine or notification channels. It cannot generate alert notifications, so it fails the requirement to 'alert' when CPU utilization is high.
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.