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GCDL Practice Question: An SRE team has a monthly error budget of 43…

This GCDL practice question tests your understanding of an sre team has a monthly error budget of 43…. Read the scenario carefully and evaluate each option against the stated constraints before committing to an answer. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.

An SRE team has a monthly error budget of 43 minutes (99.9% SLO). In the first week of the month, a deployment causes a 50-minute outage. What should the SRE team do for the remainder of the month, and why?

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An SRE team has a monthly error budget of 43 minutes (99.9% SLO). In the first week of the month, a deployment causes a 50-minute outage. What should the SRE team do for the remainder of the month, and why?

Answer choices

Why each option matters

Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.

A

Distractor review

Immediately deploy a hotfix to restore features that were rolled back during the outage.

Another deployment risks consuming more error budget. With budget exhausted, new deployments should be frozen until the budget resets next month.

B

Best answer

Freeze feature deployments for the rest of the month, focus on reliability improvements, and investigate the deployment process that caused the outage.

Budget exhausted = feature freeze. SRE teams use budget exhaustion as a signal to pause new features and focus on root cause analysis and reliability improvements before resuming velocity.

C

Distractor review

Continue deploying features normally — the outage was a one-time event and won't happen again.

Treating an outage as a one-time event without systematic improvement is a reliability anti-pattern. Error budget accounting exists precisely to make reliability costs visible and force corrective action.

D

Distractor review

Negotiate with stakeholders to increase the SLO to 99.5% to get more error budget.

Relaxing the SLO gives more budget headroom but doesn't fix the underlying reliability problem. SLOs should reflect user needs, not be adjusted to accommodate poor reliability.

Common exam trap

Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword

Many certification questions include familiar terms but test a specific constraint. Read the exact wording before choosing an answer that is generally true but wrong for this case.

Technical deep dive

How to think about this question

This question should be treated as a scenario, not a definition check. Identify the problem, the constraint and the best action. Then compare each option against those facts.

KKey Concepts to Remember

  • Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
  • Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
  • Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
  • Use explanations to understand the rule behind the answer.

TExam Day Tips

  • Underline the problem statement mentally.
  • Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
  • Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.

Key takeaway

Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.

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FAQ

Questions learners often ask

What does this GCDL question test?

Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Freeze feature deployments for the rest of the month, focus on reliability improvements, and investigate the deployment process that caused the outage. — The error budget is fully consumed (50 min > 43 min). Error budget exhaustion triggers a feature freeze — no new deployments until the following month's budget resets — prioritizing reliability over new feature releases. This is a core SRE practice: the error budget mechanizes the tension between development velocity (wants to ship features) and reliability (needs stability). When budget is gone, the system is 'on probation' until it recovers.

What should I do if I get this GCDL question wrong?

Identify which GCDL exam domain this question belongs to, then review the specific concept being tested. Practise related questions in that domain and focus on understanding why each wrong answer is tempting — not just why the correct answer is right.

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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.