Cloud Digital Leader How Google Cloud Resources Are Managed Practice Question
Which tool would you use to estimate the monthly cost of running a set of Compute Engine virtual machines before deploying them?
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
✓
Google Cloud Pricing Calculator
The Google Cloud Pricing Calculator allows you to estimate costs for various services before deployment.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Cost Management dashboard
Why it's wrong here
The Cost Management dashboard is designed to provide visibility into actual costs that have already been incurred on your Google Cloud projects, including budget tracking and anomaly alerts. It does not support hypothetical scenarios or allow you to input planned resource configurations to project future monthly expenses, so it is not the right tool for estimating costs before deployment.
- ✗
Active Assist
Why it's wrong here
Active Assist is a suite of intelligent tools that generates recommendations for optimizing existing Google Cloud resources, such as identifying idle projects, suggesting rightsizing VM machine types, or applying committed use discounts based on historical usage patterns. It operates on current, observed workload data and suggests actions to reduce spend, but it cannot model a new, not-yet-deployed architecture and produce a monthly cost estimate, making it unsuitable for upfront cost planning.
- ✓
Google Cloud Pricing Calculator
Why this is correct
The Google Cloud Pricing Calculator is an interactive, web-based tool that lets you model a wide range of GCP services—including Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and networking—by specifying region, tier, and usage levels. It generates an estimated monthly cost in real time, incorporates factors like sustained use and committed use discounts, and is the intended resource for comparing configurations and estimating expenses before building or scaling a solution.
- ✗
Billing export
Why it's wrong here
Billing export is a feature that automatically writes detailed usage and cost data to BigQuery or Cloud Storage for historical analysis, reporting, and cost optimization after invoices are generated. It does not accept prospective inputs like planned machine types or durations, and therefore cannot be used to estimate the monthly cost of a yet-to-be-run workload; it is exclusively a retrospective data pipeline for understanding past spending.
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Related to this question
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Pricing Calculator
A Pricing Calculator is a tool that lets you estimate the cost of cloud services before you start using them.
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.
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JA
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.