Cloud Digital Leader How Google Cloud Resources Are Managed Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Enable Committed Use Discounts to reduce costs.

  Why it's wrong here

  Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) reduce a project's compute cost by locking in a fixed resource usage for 1 or 3 years, but they do not generate any spending alerts or notifications. A budget alert is a separate control that monitors actual spend against a defined amount, regardless of discounts. CUDs lower the bill, whereas a budget alert notifies when the bill crosses thresholds. Therefore, they do not meet the requirement to be alerted about spending.

• ✗

  Set up billing export to BigQuery with scheduled queries.

  Why it's wrong here

  Billing export to BigQuery sends detailed billing data to BigQuery for analysis, and you can write scheduled queries to compute spend. However, a scheduled query alone cannot push notifications; you would need to build a separate pipeline, such as a BigQuery scheduled query triggering a Cloud Run job or a Cloud Function to send an email, to actually alert someone. The native budget alert feature directly sends notifications at thresholds, making it the correct, out-of-the-box method for the stated requirement.

• ✓

  Configure a budget alert in Cloud Billing with threshold rules at 50%, 90%, and 100%.

  Why this is correct

  Configuring a budget alert in Cloud Billing is the purpose-built and recommended way to receive spending alerts. You can define a budget amount (for example, a monthly cap) and set threshold rules at 50%, 90%, and 100% to trigger notifications via email or Pub/Sub when actual or forecasted costs hit those percentages. This causes the Cloud Billing system to automatically send alerts, addressing the company's need to be notified as costs approach the budget. It is the only option that explicitly provides the required alerting behavior.

• ✗

  Use Active Assist to set cost thresholds.

  Why it's wrong here

  Active Assist is a suite of intelligent tools, such as Recommender, that provides recommendations to optimize cost, security, and performance (e.g., identifying idle resources or right-sizing VMs). It does not have a feature to set or enforce cost thresholds or send budget alerts; setting thresholds is a function specific to Cloud Billing budgets. Using Active Assist for alerting would be a misapplication of the tool, as it lacks the notification mechanism the company requires.

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