Google ACE Practice Question: Ensuring Successful Operation of a Cloud Solution
You need to set up an alerting policy to notify your team via email and Slack when a Compute Engine instance's CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 5 minutes. Which two resources must you configure? (Choose two.)
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 condition on the 'compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization' metric
To create an alerting policy, you need a metric threshold condition (e.g., CPU utilization > 80% for 5 minutes) and notification channels (email, Slack). Uptime checks are for availability, not performance metrics. Log-based alerts are for log events, not 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.
- ✗
A Cloud Function to check CPU and send Slack message
Why it's wrong here
A Cloud Function that polls the Cloud Monitoring API and sends Slack messages is an anti-pattern: it duplicates the built-in alerting service, requires you to manage scheduling, error handling, and IAM, and creates a second system to maintain. Cloud Monitoring supports native notification channels (including Slack via webhooks) directly in alerting policies, so a custom function adds latency and failure modes without adding capability. Therefore this approach is not recommended when a native metric threshold condition exists.
- ✓
A metric threshold condition on the 'compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization' metric
Why this is correct
The correct condition uses a metric threshold on the time series compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization. This metric is emitted automatically from GCE instances and can be queried with a threshold (e.g., > 80%) aligned over a defined period such as 5 minutes. When the condition's duration (e.g., 'for 5 minutes') is met, the alerting policy enters the firing state and notifies any attached channels. This is the native, fully integrated way to alert on CPU load.
- ✗
An uptime check for the external IP of the instance
Why it's wrong here
An uptime check tests whether an endpoint is reachable by sending synthetic probes from Google's global vantage points to the instance's external IP or URL; it only detects availability failures like crashes, network problems, or 500 errors. It cannot observe the numeric CPU utilization percentage or any resource metric because probes do not read guest OS or hypervisor counters. Consequently, it would never trigger solely because CPU exceeded 80%, so it is the wrong tool for this requirement.
- ✓
A notification channel of type 'email'
Why this is correct
An email notification channel is a legitimate delivery target in a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy and can receive incident notifications. However, creating a channel alone does not constitute an alerting policy; it must be associated with one or more conditions that determine when to send notifications. In this scenario, email is a correct and useful component, but it is not the mechanism that detects high CPU utilization—it only handles the notification phase.
- ✗
A log-based alert for the 'compute.googleapis.com/instance' log
Why it's wrong here
A log-based alert is designed to evaluate log entries, such as error messages matching a filter, and cannot consume numeric metric values like CPU utilization. The resource type 'compute.googleapis.com/instance' refers to an instance resource, not a log stream, and the CPU utilization signal is exported as a metric, not a log entry. Using a log-based alert here would require the instance to emit a custom log entry containing CPU values, which does not happen out-of-the-box and is indirect compared to a metric threshold condition.
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Google Compute Engine
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 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.