Google PCA Practice Question: Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes
A company wants to monitor the performance of their application against a Service Level Objective (SLO) of 99.9% availability over a 30-day rolling window. They plan to use Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver). Which metric should they use as the Service Level Indicator (SLI) for availability?
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
✓
Successful request ratio
Availability is typically measured as the fraction of successful requests (e.g., HTTP 200-499) vs total requests. The other options are valid SLIs for other aspects: latency, error rate, or saturation.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Successful request ratio
Why this is correct
Availability SLI is often the ratio of successful responses (e.g., HTTP 200-499) to total requests. This directly measures uptime.
- ✗
Error rate
Why it's wrong here
Error rate is related to availability but not directly. Availability is usually defined as the fraction of successful requests, not the rate of errors.
- ✗
Request latency
Why it's wrong here
Latency is a performance SLI, not availability. Availability measures whether the service is up and reachable.
- ✗
CPU utilization
Why it's wrong here
CPU utilization is a resource saturation metric, not a direct indicator of service availability.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
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
SLI
An SLI (Service Level Indicator) is a carefully chosen metric that measures one specific aspect of a service's performance, such as request latency or error rate, to help determine whether the service is meeting its reliability goals.
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