Google PCA Practice Question: Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability
An engineer needs to troubleshoot a production issue on a Compute Engine instance. They suspect the instance is running out of memory. Which THREE actions should they take to diagnose the problem? (Choose THREE.)
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
✓
SSH into the instance and run 'free -m' to check memory usage
Option A is correct because running 'free -m' over SSH directly reports the instance's current RAM and swap usage in megabytes, immediately confirming whether memory is exhausted. Option B is correct because when the Linux kernel OOM killer terminates processes, it logs messages such as 'Out of memory: Killed process' to the kernel log, which is captured by the Cloud Logging agent and searchable in Logs Explorer. Option E is correct because the Cloud Monitoring agent (or Ops Agent) publishes the 'memory/utilization' metric, letting the engineer review historical memory trends and correlate spikes with the incident. Option C is not a diagnostic action but a remediation that changes the machine type and requires a stop/start, so it does not help identify the cause. Option D is also not diagnostic; creating a boot disk snapshot only preserves disk state and does not reveal memory consumption.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
SSH into the instance and run 'free -m' to check memory usage
Why this is correct
Running 'free -m' over SSH reads the instance's actual memory counters, showing total, used, free and swap usage plus buffer/cache. This directly confirms or rules out memory exhaustion on the guest OS, which external metrics alone cannot attribute to specific processes.
- ✓
Check Cloud Logging for OOM (out-of-memory) kernel messages
Why this is correct
The Linux kernel logs OOM killer messages to the system log when it terminates processes to reclaim memory. Searching Cloud Logging for these entries confirms memory exhaustion occurred and identifies which process was killed, giving definitive evidence beyond utilisation graphs.
- ✗
Increase the instance's memory by changing the machine type
Why it's wrong here
Changing the machine type resizes the instance, which is a remediation step, not diagnosis; it also requires a stop/start and destroys the evidence before metrics are gathered. It is tempting because vertical scaling is the eventual fix once memory exhaustion is confirmed, making it correct after diagnosis rather than during troubleshooting.
- ✗
Create a snapshot of the boot disk
Why it's wrong here
A boot disk snapshot captures persistent disk contents, not live RAM, so it reveals nothing about memory exhaustion. It is tempting because snapshots are the standard tool for recovering or cloning a failed instance's disk, which would be the right action if the suspected fault were disk corruption or data loss rather than memory pressure.
- ✓
View the instance's memory utilization metric in Cloud Monitoring
Why this is correct
The Cloud Monitoring memory utilisation metric, collected by the Ops Agent, shows historical and current memory consumption for the instance. Trending this metric reveals whether memory is climbing toward exhaustion, correlating the suspected condition with the production incident's timeframe.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Google Cloud Compute Options Overview
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.
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.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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.