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PCDE Practice Question: A team wants to implement an on-call rotation…
A team wants to implement an on-call rotation using Cloud Monitoring and third-party tools. Which three components are essential for setting up on-call alerting? (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
✓
An escalation policy
Essential components: alerting policy to trigger notifications, notification channel to reach on-call engineers, and escalation policy to handle unacknowledged alerts. A dashboard and runbook are helpful but not essential for the on-call rotation itself.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
An escalation policy
Why this is correct
Ensures alerts are handled if the primary contact does not respond.
- ✓
A notification channel (e.g., PagerDuty, OpsGenie)
Why this is correct
Delivers the alert to the on-call engineer.
- ✓
A Cloud Monitoring alerting policy
Why this is correct
Defines when to alert.
- ✗
A Cloud Monitoring dashboard
Why it's wrong here
Dashboards are for visualization, not alerting.
- ✗
A runbook for incident response
Why it's wrong here
Runbooks guide response but are not essential for setting up on-call rotation.
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Same concept, more angles
1 more way this is tested on PCDE
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. Which TWO components are essential for setting up an incident management on-call rotation in Google Cloud? (Choose 2)
medium- ✓ A.Cloud Monitoring alert notification channels
- ✓ B.On-call schedule defined in PagerDuty or OpsGenie
- C.Cloud Build trigger for incidents
- D.Cloud Functions to handle alerts
- E.Traffic Director routing rules
Why A: Cloud Monitoring alert notification channels are used to route alerts to on-call tools like PagerDuty or OpsGenie. An on-call schedule defines who is on call. The other options are not directly related.
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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.