Google ACE Practice Question: Ensuring Successful Operation of a Cloud Solution
You need to monitor the uptime of an external HTTPS endpoint that is critical to your application. Which Google Cloud service should you use to create an uptime check?
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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Cloud Monitoring
Cloud Monitoring provides uptime checks that can monitor HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP endpoints from multiple locations.
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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Cloud Monitoring
Why this is correct
Cloud Monitoring includes native uptime checks that actively send HTTPS GET requests to the external endpoint from multiple global locations, verifying that the service is reachable and that expected HTTP status codes are returned. You can set response-time thresholds and alerting policies on these checks to trigger notifications when the endpoint fails or becomes slow. This makes it the correct service for monitoring endpoint availability rather than merely analyzing its internal behavior.
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Cloud Debugger
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Debugger is designed to inspect the live state of a running application by capturing call stacks and variable values at specific code locations without pausing execution. It is a code-level debugging tool used to identify logic errors, not a network probing tool that can determine whether an external HTTPS endpoint is up. Uptime checks require synthetic requests from external agents, which Cloud Debugger cannot perform.
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Cloud Trace
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Trace provides distributed tracing to analyze latency across services by recording spans for each request as it flows through an application, helping find performance bottlenecks in internal call chains. It works only on requests that actually reach your instrumented services; it cannot generate test traffic or probe an external endpoint that may be unreachable. Thus, it is useful for understanding request duration after traffic arrives, but it cannot answer the fundamental question of whether the endpoint is currently available.
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Cloud Logging
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Logging aggregates, stores, and lets you query log entries from existing applications, services, and infrastructure, but it is inherently passive and cannot generate its own requests to an external HTTPS endpoint. It will only show evidence of failures if your own application happens to log them, and it knows nothing about the endpoint's availability from the outside perspective. Monitoring uptime requires active, independent probes, which Cloud Logging by itself does not provide.
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Google Cloud Platform Overview
Key term
TCP
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is a core internet protocol that ensures data is sent reliably and in order between devices over a network.
Key term
Uptime check
An uptime check is a monitoring test that verifies whether a system or service is running and accessible over a network.
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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.