Google ACE Practice Question: Ensuring Successful Operation of a Cloud Solution
You need to export all Cloud Logging logs from your project to BigQuery for long-term analysis. What should you create?
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
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A log sink with destination BigQuery
Log sinks route logs to supported destinations including BigQuery.
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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A Cloud Monitoring dashboard
Why it's wrong here
A Cloud Monitoring dashboard is a visualization layer that renders metrics and time-series data, not raw log entries. Creating or viewing a dashboard never transfers log data to another system, so it cannot serve as an export mechanism for Cloud Logging. Dashboards are for real-time observability, not for moving or storing logs.
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A VPC flow log
Why it's wrong here
VPC flow logs are a specific type of log that captures IP traffic information for VMs and are generated by the VPC infrastructure itself. Enabling them only starts collecting new flow data; it does not export the existing set of all Cloud Logging logs from your project. This option confuses a log source with a log export destination.
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A log-based alert
Why it's wrong here
A log-based alert triggers notifications (email, Pub/Sub, webhooks) when log messages match a specified filter, but it does not route, copy, or persist the underlying logs elsewhere. Alerts are consumed at query time and only send metadata; they leave the original logs untouched in Cloud Logging. Thus, an alert cannot be used to export all logs to an external storage system.
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A log sink with destination BigQuery
Why this is correct
A log sink in Cloud Logging's Router exports matching log entries to a destination such as BigQuery, Cloud Storage, or Pub/Sub. By configuring a sink with BigQuery as the destination and a filter that matches all logs (or empty filter), you continuously export your project's logs to a BigQuery dataset for analysis and long-term retention. This is the standard and only fully supported mechanism for exporting Cloud Logging logs to external services.
Go deeper
Related to this question
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Google Cloud Platform Overview
Key term
BigQuery
BigQuery is a fully managed, serverless data warehouse on Google Cloud that lets you run fast SQL queries on massive datasets without managing any infrastructure.
Key term
Cloud logging
Cloud logging is the practice of collecting, storing, and analyzing log data generated by cloud-based resources and applications to monitor performance, troubleshoot issues, and maintain security.
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JA
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.