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.

• ✗

  Use the Cost Management dashboard to monitor spending and disable billing manually.

  Why it's wrong here

  The Cost Management dashboard is a visualization tool that shows historical and current spend, but it has no programmatic triggers or outbound integrations. Relying on a human to watch it and manually disable billing cannot satisfy a near-real-time automated response requirement. This approach also bypasses Cloud Billing budgets and Pub/Sub, which are the foundational services designed to emit threshold-based events for automation.

• ✗

  Create a budget alert at 100% only and manually disable billing when alerted.

  Why it's wrong here

  Creating a single budget alert at 100% gives only one notification point and does not provide early warning or an automated action. Manually disabling billing after being alerted requires human intervention, which slows remediation and risks missing the window if no one is monitoring. Additionally, budget alerts alone only send notifications—they do not terminate resource usage unless you build a separate automation to consume that alert and call the Cloud Billing API.

• ✗

  Create a budget with thresholds at 50%, 75%, 100% and set the 'disable billing' action on the budget.

  Why it's wrong here

  Cloud Billing budgets support threshold rules that trigger notifications, but they do not have a built-in action called 'disable billing'. This option conflates budget thresholds with an action that does not exist in the GCP product. To disable billing programmatically, you must deploy a separate service, such as a Cloud Function invoked via Pub/Sub, which calls the billing account update endpoint to explicitly disable the account.

• ✓

  Create a budget with thresholds at 50%, 75%, 100% and set up a Cloud Function that listens to Pub/Sub messages from the budget to automatically disable billing when a 120% threshold is exceeded.

  Why this is correct

  This is the correct architecture: Cloud Billing budgets can send threshold-alert messages to a Pub/Sub topic when spend crosses defined percentages (e.g., 50%, 75%, 100%, 120%). A Cloud Function subscribes to that topic, parses the budget notification payload, and if the cost exceeds the intended final threshold (120%), it invokes the Cloud Billing API to disable the billing account. This provides near-real-time, automated enforcement without manual steps, while the earlier thresholds serve as warnings that can trigger other notifications or actions.

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