Google ACE Practice Question: Ensuring Successful Operation of a Cloud Solution
You need to be notified when the CPU utilization of any Compute Engine instance in your project exceeds 80% for 5 minutes. Which Cloud Monitoring feature should you 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
✓
Metric threshold alerting policy
Metric threshold alerting policies allow you to set conditions based on metric values. When the condition (CPU > 80% for 5 minutes) is met, the alert fires and sends notifications via configured channels.
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 it's wrong here
Uptime checks verify external service reachability by sending synthetic HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP probes from monitored locations; they can detect a down endpoint or slow response but never read the guest OS's CPU utilization metric. CPU saturation can exist while the service still answers 200 OK, so an uptime check would incorrectly report healthy. Therefore it cannot provide the required CPU threshold notification.
- ✗
Log-based alert
Why it's wrong here
Log-based alerting policies evaluate incoming log entries against a filter, for example matching an ERROR string, and notify when a matching log is ingested. CPU utilization is a numeric metric stream published to Cloud Monitoring, not a log entry, and without custom logging of metrics you won't have CPU data flowing through Cloud Logging. Even if you hacked a workaround, it would be indirect and not a metric threshold policy; thus it's incorrect for this requirement.
- ✓
Metric threshold alerting policy
Why this is correct
A metric threshold alerting policy is the native Cloud Monitoring mechanism for checking a numeric metric stream against a condition, such as compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization being above 80% for 5 minutes. You configure an alignment period, aggregator, window, and threshold, then route the incident to notification channels like email, Pub/Sub, or mobile. This directly consumes the CPU utilization metric and triggers a notification only when the threshold condition is met.
- ✗
Dashboard
Why it's wrong here
Dashboards are read-only visualizations that plot metric series like CPU utilization on chart widgets; they are useful for ad-hoc troubleshooting and monitoring at a glance. Dashboards do not evaluate conditions or send alerts, so there is no way to be proactively notified when CPU crosses a threshold. Thus a dashboard alone doesn't fulfill the requirement to get notified.
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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
Compute Engine
Compute Engine is Google Cloud's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google's infrastructure.
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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.