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Refer to the Exhibit Practice Questions

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Scenario guide

How to approach refer to the exhibit practice questions

Practise exhibit-style questions that ask you to read a topology, table, command output or diagram before choosing the best answer.

Quick answer

Exhibit-style questions test whether you can read a topology, command output, diagram or table before choosing the best answer.

How to extract the relevant detail from an exhibit.

How topology, command output or routing information affects the answer.

How to avoid answering from memory before reading the evidence.

How to map the exhibit back to the exam objective.

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Practice set

Practice scenarios

Question 1hardmultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. The SLO for the payments-api service is 99.9% availability over 30 days. The current compliance is 99.89% and the error budget is exhausted. Which action should the SRE team take FIRST?

Exhibit

SLO History for last 30 days:
Service: payments-api
SLO: 99.9% availability over 30 days
Compliance: 99.89%
Error budget remaining: 0%
Burn rate: 2.5 over last 1 hour
Alert: Error budget exhausted
Question 2mediummultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. A Cloud Storage bucket has this IAM policy. What security recommendation should be made?

Exhibit

```json
{
  "bindings": [
    {
      "role": "roles/storage.objectViewer",
      "members": [
        "allUsers"
      ]
    }
  ]
}
```
Question 3hardmultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. A Cloud Deployment Manager deployment fails with the error 'Resource 'my-firewall' already exists'. What is the most likely cause?

Exhibit

resources:
- name: my-firewall
  type: compute.v1.firewall
  properties:
    network: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/my-project/global/networks/default
    allowed:
    - IPProtocol: tcp
      ports: ['80','443']
    sourceRanges: ['0.0.0.0/0']
- name: my-instance
  type: compute.v1.instance
  properties:
    zone: us-central1-a
    machineType: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/my-project/zones/us-central1-a/machineTypes/n1-standard-1
    networkInterfaces:
    - network: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/my-project/global/networks/default
      accessConfigs:
      - name: External NAT
        type: ONE_TO_ONE_NAT
Question 4hardmultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. An engineer created an instance with a startup script that references a Cloud Storage bucket. The instance boots but the startup script fails. What is the most likely cause?

Exhibit

gcloud compute instances get-serial-port-output instance-1 --zone=us-central1-a
[   0.000000] Linux version 5.10.0-26-cloud-amd64 (debian-kernel@lists.debian.org) ...
[   0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.10.0-26-cloud-amd64 root=PARTUUID=xxx ro console=ttyS0,115200n8 net.ifnames=0
...
[   1.234567] systemd[1]: Starting Google Compute Engine Guest Agent...
[   1.345678] systemd[1]: Starting Google Compute Engine Startup Scripts...
[   2.345678] startup-script: INFO Found startup script in metadata: key=startup-script, content=...
[   2.456789] startup-script: INFO Executing startup script...
[   2.567890] startup-script: ERROR: Could not find resource 'gs://my-bucket/startup.sh'
[   2.678901] startup-script: ERROR: script returned exit code 1
[   2.789012] systemd[1]: google-startup-scripts.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Question 5mediummultiple choice
Full question →

An organization is implementing a Hub-and-Spoke network topology with multiple VPCs. Which Google Cloud product is designed for centralized connectivity and policy enforcement?

Question 6mediummultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. A developer wants to SSH into instance-1 from their local machine. Which command should they use?

Exhibit

NAME       ZONE        MACHINE_TYPE  PREEMPTIBLE  INTERNAL_IP   EXTERNAL_IP
instance-1 us-central1-a n1-standard-4 true        10.128.0.2    35.184.0.1
instance-2 us-central1-b n1-standard-4 false       10.128.0.3    35.184.0.2
Question 7hardmultiple choice
Full question →

You are running a Kubernetes cluster in GKE with the default node pool configuration shown in the exhibit. Your application requires high disk I/O performance. You notice that the application is experiencing high latency for disk operations. What is the most likely cause?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.

```
$ gcloud container clusters describe my-cluster --region us-central1
...
nodePools:
- config:
    diskSizeGb: 100
    diskType: pd-standard
    imageType: COS_CONTAINERD
    machineType: n1-standard-2
    oauthScopes:
    - https://www.googleapis.com/auth/devstorage.read_only
  initialNodeCount: 3
  management:
    autoRepair: true
    autoUpgrade: true
  name: default-pool
...
```
Question 8hardmultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. A Deployment Manager template deploys a GKE cluster and a job that publishes to Pub/Sub. The job fails with a permission error. Which change would fix the issue?

Exhibit

Deployment Manager manifest:
resources:
- name: my-cluster
  type: container.v1.cluster
  properties:
    zone: us-central1-a
    initialNodeCount: 3
    nodeConfig:
      machineType: n1-standard-1
      oauthScopes:
      - https://www.googleapis.com/auth/pubsub
- name: my-job
  type: container.v1.job
  properties:
    cluster: $(ref.my-cluster.name)
    template:
      spec:
        containers:
        - image: gcr.io/my-project/publisher
          env:
          - name: TOPIC
            value: my-topic
        restartPolicy: Never
    dependsOn: [my-cluster]

After deployment, the job fails with "Permission denied" when publishing to Pub/Sub topic my-topic.
Question 9easymultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. What is the effect of this IAM policy on a Cloud Storage bucket?

Exhibit

{
  "bindings": [
    {
      "role": "roles/storage.objectViewer",
      "members": [
        "user:alice@example.com",
        "domain:example.com"
      ]
    }
  ]
}
Question 10hardmultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. A Cloud Function processes files uploaded to Cloud Storage. It usually completes within 2 minutes, but recently it has been timing out after 540 seconds. What is the most likely cause?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.

Cloud Functions log entry:

```json
{
  "severity": "ERROR",
  "jsonPayload": {
    "message": "Function execution failed with timeout after 540s",
    "execution_id": "1234"
  },
  "resource": {
    "type": "cloud_function",
    "labels": {
      "function_name": "process-file",
      "region": "us-central1"
    }
  },
  "timestamp": "2024-01-15T10:00:00Z"
}
```
Question 11mediummultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. The exhibit shows logs and a metric from a GCE instance that was terminated. The instance was part of a managed instance group. Which diagnostic step should be taken FIRST to prevent recurrence?

Exhibit

Stackdriver Logging query results:
resource.type="gce_instance"
logName="projects/my-project/logs/syslog"

Timestamps:
2023-11-01 10:15:23 UTC - Out of memory: Killed process 1234 (java)
2023-11-01 10:15:24 UTC - Out of memory: Killed process 5678 (python)
2023-11-01 10:15:25 UTC - Out of memory: Killed process 9012 (node)

Monitoring metric: instance/disk/bytes_used (gce_instance)
Value: 95% at 10:15:20 UTC
Question 12mediummultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. A user creates a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance and a Compute Engine VM. The VM cannot connect to the database. What is the most likely cause?

Network Topology
database-version=POSTGRES_13tier=db-custom-2-7680region=us-central1edition=enterpriseroot-password=Passw0rd!assign-ip
Question 13hardmultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. The HPA is configured to scale based on CPU, but it has not scaled up despite the CPU usage being above the target. Which is the most likely cause?

Exhibit

gcloud container clusters describe my-cluster --zone us-central1-a
...
nodePools:
- name: default-pool
  config:
    machineType: n1-standard-4
    diskSizeGb: 100
    imageType: COS_CONTAINERD
    oauthScopes:
    - https://www.googleapis.com/auth/devstorage.read_only
  initialNodeCount: 3
  autoscaling:
    enabled: true
    minNodeCount: 1
    maxNodeCount: 10

Horizontal Pod Autoscaler:
  Name: my-hpa
  Min replicas: 3
  Max replicas: 20
  CPU target: 80%

Current state: The deployment has 5 pods. CPU usage is at 90%. The HPA has not scaled up.
Question 14mediummultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. An engineer deploys this Terraform configuration. After deployment, they can SSH into the VM using its public IP. However, they want to restrict SSH access to only a specific IP range (203.0.113.0/24). What change is required?

Exhibit

resource "google_compute_firewall" "allow_ssh" {
  name    = "allow-ssh"
  network = "default"
  priority = 1000
  allow {
    protocol = "tcp"
    ports    = ["22"]
  }
  source_ranges = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
  target_tags   = ["ssh-allowed"]
}

resource "google_compute_instance" "my_instance" {
  name         = "my-instance"
  machine_type = "e2-micro"
  zone         = "us-central1-a"
  tags         = ["web", "ssh-allowed"]
  boot_disk {
    initialize_params {
      image = "debian-cloud/debian-11"
    }
  }
  network_interface {
    network = "default"
    access_config {
      // Ephemeral public IP
    }
  }
}
Question 15easymultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. The output is from `gcloud compute instances describe instance-1 --format=json`. What can you conclude from this output?

Exhibit

{
  "kind": "compute#instance",
  "name": "instance-1",
  "machineType": "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/my-project/zones/us-central1-a/machineTypes/n1-standard-2",
  "cpuPlatform": "Intel Skylake",
  "creationTimestamp": "2024-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00",
  "status": "RUNNING"
}

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