Google PCA Practice Question: Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes
An organization runs a critical application on Compute Engine with a 99.99% SLO. They have set an error budget of 0.01% over a 30-day window. Recently, an unexpected traffic spike caused a 0.005% error rate for a few hours. Which THREE actions align with SRE best practices? (Choose 3)
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 to understand the root cause and prevent recurrence.
SRE best practices include using error budgets to drive decisions, conducting blameless postmortems, and adjusting capacity based on usage. Relying on past data and ignoring the spike is not proactive.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Immediately rollback any recent changes to prevent further errors.
Why it's wrong here
Rollback may be premature without understanding the root cause; the error is within budget.
- ✗
Disable monitoring alerts for the error rate to avoid false alarms.
Why it's wrong here
Alerting is important; disabling it is counterproductive.
- ✓
Conduct a blameless postmortem to understand the root cause and prevent recurrence.
Why this is correct
Blameless postmortems are key to learning and improving reliability.
- ✓
Accept the incident as within the error budget and focus on other improvements.
Why this is correct
The error rate (0.005%) is within the budget (0.01%), so it's acceptable according to SRE.
- ✓
Increase capacity proactively for anticipated future spikes.
Why this is correct
Capacity planning based on observed patterns is a good SRE practice.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Google Cloud Resource Hierarchy and Organization
Key term
Error budget
An error budget is the maximum amount of acceptable downtime or failure a system can experience within a specified period while still meeting its Service Level Objective (SLO).
Key term
Data
Data is raw, unprocessed information, like numbers, words, or measurements, that can be stored, processed, and analyzed by computers.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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