Cloud Digital Leader Google Cloud Products and Services Practice Question
A company wants to monitor the CPU and memory utilisation of their Compute Engine instances and set up alerts when utilisation exceeds 80%. Which Google Cloud service should they 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
✓
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud Monitoring (formerly Stackdriver) collects metrics from GCP resources, including CPU and memory utilisation, and allows creation of alerting policies. Cloud Logging is for logs, Cloud Trace is for tracing, and Cloud Error Reporting is for error analysis.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Cloud Monitoring
Why this is correct
Cloud Monitoring is the correct service because it is purpose-built to ingest and store numeric time-series metrics, such as CPU utilization and memory usage, from resources like Compute Engine and Kubernetes. It provides alerting policies that trigger notifications when these metrics cross user-defined thresholds, and offers dashboards and querying via MQL or PromQL. This is the standard GCP tool for real-time infrastructure observability, not just logging or error tracking.
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Cloud Logging
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Logging stores and aggregates textual log entries from applications and services, providing search, filtering, and log-based metrics. However, log entries are not structured numeric time-series data by default, and parsing CPU/memory values from logs would require custom work and lacks the native timestamp-aligned storage that Cloud Monitoring provides. While logs can be exported and used for analysis, they are not designed for threshold-based alerting on resource utilization directly, making this the wrong choice for continuous metric monitoring.
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Cloud Error Reporting
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Error Reporting automatically surfaces and groups application exceptions, crashes, and stack traces that are extracted from logs. Its sole focus is error signals—what failed and where—rather than infrastructure performance metrics like CPU or memory utilization. It does not process numeric utilization data, nor does it support alert thresholds on resource usage, so it cannot fulfill the requirement to monitor utilization levels.
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Cloud Trace
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Trace is a distributed tracing tool that analyzes latency across services and requests, showing how time is spent in each step of a request path. It collects trace spans with duration data, not infrastructure resource utilization metrics such as CPU or memory. While it helps diagnose performance bottlenecks in application calls, it cannot alert on host-level resource thresholds, making it irrelevant for this monitoring requirement.
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Cloud Digital Transformation
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.
Key term
Trace
A trace is a record of the path and timing of a request or operation as it moves through components in a system, used to monitor performance and troubleshoot issues.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This GCDL 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 GCDL exam.