Google PCA Practice Question: Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes
A company is adopting Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. After a major incident, they want to conduct a review to understand what went wrong and how to prevent recurrence, without blaming individuals. Which SRE practice should they follow?
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
✓
Conduct a blameless postmortem
A blameless postmortem focuses on learning from incidents without assigning blame. Error budgets are for measuring reliability, SLOs/SLIs are for defining targets, and capacity planning is for scaling.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Define SLOs and SLIs
Why it's wrong here
SLOs and SLIs quantify reliability targets and measure service performance; they do not investigate an incident's contributing causes. They are tempting because they underpin SRE decision-making, and would be correct when defining measurable reliability goals, not for the blameless postmortem the scenario requires.
- ✗
Create an error budget policy
Why it's wrong here
An error budget policy defines actions when SLOs are breached; it governs release velocity, not incident analysis. It is tempting because it is a core SRE artefact tied to reliability decisions, and would be correct when deciding whether to freeze changes after exhausting a budget, not for a blameless postmortem.
- ✗
Perform capacity planning
Why it's wrong here
Capacity planning forecasts resource demand to meet future load; it does not examine an incident's causes or prevent recurrence. It is tempting because it is a recognised SRE reliability activity, and would be correct when provisioning ahead of traffic growth rather than conducting a blameless retrospective after an outage.
- ✓
Conduct a blameless postmortem
Why this is correct
A blameless postmortem examines the systemic and process failures behind an incident, documenting contributing causes and corrective actions without attributing fault to individuals. This directly satisfies the stem's dual requirement: understanding what went wrong and preventing recurrence, while preserving the psychological safety that encourages honest reporting.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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