Google PCA Practice Question: Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes
A company runs a critical application on Compute Engine. The operations team wants to improve the mean time to recovery (MTTR) for incidents. They currently use manual runbooks stored in a wiki. You need to recommend a solution that automates incident response and integrates with existing monitoring. What should you do?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that scheduled scripts or platform migrations are needed, when the goal is event-driven automation integrated with monitoring.
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
✓
Implement Cloud Monitoring alerting policies that trigger Cloud Functions to execute remediation steps.
Cloud Monitoring alerting policies can trigger Pub/Sub, which invokes Cloud Functions to perform automated remediation. This is a native, serverless, event-driven approach that integrates with existing monitoring and reduces MTTR. Other options either require architectural changes, are not event-driven, or add unnecessary complexity.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Deploy a third-party AIOps platform on Compute Engine.
Why it's wrong here
A third-party AIOps platform adds cost and complexity, and may require significant integration effort. While it can provide advanced analytics, the scenario requires a straightforward automation of incident response using existing monitoring. Google Cloud native tools can achieve this more simply and cost-effectively.
- ✓
Implement Cloud Monitoring alerting policies that trigger Cloud Functions to execute remediation steps.
Why this is correct
Cloud Monitoring alerting policies can send notifications to Pub/Sub, which can trigger Cloud Functions. This allows automated remediation such as restarting a VM or scaling a deployment. It integrates with existing monitoring and reduces MTTR by removing manual steps. This is a native, serverless approach that requires no additional infrastructure.
- ✗
Migrate the application to GKE and use liveness probes for automatic restarts.
Why it's wrong here
Migrating to GKE is a significant architectural change and may not be feasible for the immediate goal of improving MTTR for the existing application. Liveness probes only restart containers, not VMs, and do not address broader incident response. The scenario asks for automation integrated with monitoring, not a platform migration.
- ✗
Use Cloud Scheduler to run a script every 5 minutes that checks for issues and fixes them.
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Scheduler runs jobs on a schedule, not in response to monitoring alerts. This adds latency and may not correlate with actual incidents. It also requires custom scripting and does not integrate with Cloud Monitoring alerting. The goal is to automate response to incidents, which should be event-driven, not time-driven.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Virtual Machine Instances in Compute Engine
Key term
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud monitoring is the process of observing, measuring, and managing an organization's cloud infrastructure and applications to ensure performance, availability, and security.
Key term
Cloud Functions
Cloud Functions are serverless compute services that let you run single-purpose code in response to events without managing servers.
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JA
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
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