Question 257 of 1,446
PCDE Plan and manage database infrastructure Practice Question
A company runs a production Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance used by a web application. The instance experiences intermittent latency spikes during peak hours. You need to diagnose the cause without downtime. Which tool should you use first?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Cloud SQL Insights with a general monitoring tool like VPC Flow Logs or assume that failing over to a read replica is a diagnostic step, when in fact Insights is the only option that provides database-internal performance data without downtime.
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
✓
Use Cloud SQL Insights to analyze query performance and identify slow queries.
Cloud SQL Insights provides built-in query performance monitoring and diagnostics without requiring any downtime. It surfaces slow queries, lock contention, and resource bottlenecks directly from the PostgreSQL engine, making it the ideal first step to identify the root cause of intermittent latency spikes during peak hours.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use Database Migration Service to failover to a read replica.
Why it's wrong here
Failover is for availability, not diagnosing latency.
- ✓
Use Cloud SQL Insights to analyze query performance and identify slow queries.
Why this is correct
Cloud SQL Insights provides query-level performance diagnostics without downtime.
- ✗
Use gcloud sql instances describe to check instance configuration.
Why it's wrong here
This command shows metadata, not real-time performance.
- ✗
Use VPC Flow Logs to analyze network traffic.
Why it's wrong here
VPC Flow Logs capture network flows, not database query performance.
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Last reviewed: Jun 11, 2026
This PCDE 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 PCDE exam.
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