Google PCA Practice Question: Managing and Provisioning a Solution Infrastructure
A company wants to monitor the performance of their microservices deployed on Cloud Run. They need to capture request latencies and error rates, and also trace requests across services. Which TWO services should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
PCA often tests the distinction between logging, monitoring, and tracing services; candidates might confuse Cloud Logging with Cloud Monitoring or overlook Cloud Trace for distributed tracing.
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
✓
Cloud Trace
Cloud Trace (A) is correct because it is Google Cloud's distributed tracing service, which collects and correlates latency data across microservices so a single request can be followed from one Cloud Run service to the next. Cloud Monitoring (E) is correct because it ingests Cloud Run request metrics such as request count, latency, and error rates, and lets you build dashboards and alerting policies on them. Together they satisfy the stated requirements of capturing request latencies and error rates while tracing requests across services. Error Reporting (B) only aggregates and groups application exceptions, Cloud Profiler (C) analyzes CPU and memory usage of running code, and Cloud Logging (D) stores log entries; none of these provide distributed tracing or the request-level latency and error-rate metrics required here.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Cloud Trace
Why this is correct
Cloud Trace captures distributed traces across microservices, satisfying the requirement to trace requests spanning services. It records per-request latency data, letting you pinpoint slow spans within a call chain. Error rates, however, come from Cloud Monitoring, so Trace alone covers only the tracing and latency constraints in the stem.
- ✗
Error Reporting
Why it's wrong here
Error Reporting aggregates and groups application exceptions, showing counts and affected services, but it does not measure request latency or trace requests across services. It would be correct when triaging which exceptions are newly spiking after a deployment.
- ✗
Cloud Profiler
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Profiler continuously samples CPU and heap usage to attribute resource consumption to code functions; it captures neither request latency nor error rates, and provides no distributed tracing. It would be correct when diagnosing which function consumes excessive CPU or memory in a running service.
- ✗
Cloud Logging
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Logging stores and queries log entries, but latency metrics and cross-service trace correlation are not its function; it lacks the metric and span model those require. It would be correct for retaining application log text, auditing events, or troubleshooting via log-based queries.
- ✓
Cloud Monitoring
Why this is correct
Cloud Monitoring collects and visualises time-series metrics, including request latency distributions and error rates from Cloud Run. It directly satisfies the stem's requirement to capture latencies and error rates, while tracing across services is handled separately.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Resource Monitoring and Logging with Cloud Operations
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
Cloud Run
Cloud Run is a fully managed compute platform from Google Cloud that lets you run containerized applications in a serverless environment, automatically scaling from zero to thousands of requests.
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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
This PCA 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 PCA exam.