Cloud Digital Leader Scaling with Google Cloud operations Practice Question
A startup's engineering team wants to monitor the CPU utilization of its Compute Engine instances and receive an alert when utilization exceeds 80% for 5 minutes. They want a fully managed Google Cloud solution that requires minimal setup and integrates with their existing dashboards. Which Google Cloud service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Cloud Monitoring with Cloud Logging, but only Cloud Monitoring is designed for numeric metrics and threshold-based alerts.
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 is the Google Cloud service for collecting metrics, creating dashboards, and setting up alerts. It automatically collects CPU utilization from Compute Engine instances and allows you to define an alerting policy that triggers when the metric exceeds a threshold for a specified duration. This matches the team's need for a managed, low-effort monitoring solution.
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 a fully managed service that collects metrics such as CPU utilization from Compute Engine instances, lets you create dashboards, and supports alerting policies based on thresholds and durations. It integrates natively with Google Cloud and requires minimal setup, making it the ideal solution for this scenario.
- ✗
Cloud Logging
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Logging is designed to ingest, store, and analyze log data, not to collect numeric metrics like CPU utilization or to trigger threshold-based alerts. While you can create log-based alerts, they are not suited for continuous metric monitoring such as CPU percentage. The team needs a metrics-focused monitoring service, so Cloud Logging is not the right choice here.
- ✗
Cloud Profiler
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Profiler is a continuous profiling tool that analyzes the performance of your application code, such as CPU and memory usage at the function level. It is not intended for infrastructure monitoring or alerting on instance-level metrics. The team needs to monitor VM CPU utilization, which is outside Cloud Profiler's scope.
- ✗
Cloud Trace
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Trace is a distributed tracing system that helps you understand how long requests take to propagate through your application. It focuses on latency analysis, not on infrastructure metrics like CPU utilization. It cannot alert on CPU thresholds, so it does not meet the team's monitoring and alerting requirements.
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Private Service Connect and Private Access
Key term
Service
A service is a software component or system that performs a specific function and is available to be used by other programs or users over a network.
Key term
Google Cloud
Google Cloud is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides infrastructure, platform, and software solutions over the internet.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Google Cloud exam blueprint
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.