Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability →mediumMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped
Google PCA Practice Question: Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability
An organization wants to receive alerts when their Cloud SQL instance's CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 5 minutes. They want to send the alert to both email and a Pub/Sub topic for further processing. What should they do?
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
✓
Create a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy with a metric threshold condition on CPU utilization and add both email and Pub/Sub notification channels
In Cloud Monitoring, an alerting policy can have multiple notification channels (email, Pub/Sub, PagerDuty, SMS). The CPU utilization metric is available via the 'cloudsql.googleapis.com' metric type.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Configure a Cloud Scheduler job to check CPU utilization and publish to Pub/Sub
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Scheduler is not designed for monitoring and alerting; it would require custom code and lacks integration.
- ✗
Create a log-based alert for CPU utilization using Logging and route to email and Pub/Sub
Why it's wrong here
CPU utilization is a metric, not a log entry. Log-based alerts are for log entries, not metrics.
- ✓
Create a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy with a metric threshold condition on CPU utilization and add both email and Pub/Sub notification channels
Why this is correct
This is the correct approach. Metric threshold conditions trigger on CPU utilization, and multiple notification channels can be added.
- ✗
Use Cloud Functions to poll the Cloud Monitoring API every minute and send notifications
Why it's wrong here
This is an overly complex and less reliable solution compared to using native alerting policies.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
Key term
Alerting policy
An alerting policy is a set of rules that defines when to send notifications about a system condition that needs attention.
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.