PCDOE Practice Question: Applying site reliability engineering practices
A team uses Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. They receive an alert that the database's CPU utilization is above 95% for the past 30 minutes. Queries are taking longer than usual. They want to investigate without causing further impact. What should they do first?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the principle that the first step in incident management is always to gather diagnostic data without making changes, and the trap here is that candidates may jump to scaling (Option A) or restarting (Option B) as quick fixes, ignoring that these actions can cause further disruption and do not provide root-cause analysis.
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 Query Insights to find the most time-consuming queries
Cloud SQL Query Insights is a managed monitoring tool that automatically captures and analyzes query performance metrics, including CPU consumption, latency, and execution plans. In this scenario, it allows the team to identify the specific queries causing high CPU utilization without making any changes to the instance, thus avoiding further impact. This is the first and safest diagnostic step before any remediation.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the number of vCPUs of the Cloud SQL instance
Why it's wrong here
Scaling up is a mitigation but should be done after understanding the cause.
- ✗
Restart the Cloud SQL instance to clear the cache
Why it's wrong here
Restarting causes downtime and does not fix the root cause.
- ✗
Migrate the database to Cloud Spanner
Why it's wrong here
Migration is a long-term project, not an immediate investigation step.
- ✓
Use Cloud SQL Query Insights to find the most time-consuming queries
Why this is correct
Query Insights shows top queries by CPU and latency.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PCDOE 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 PCDOE exam.