PCDOE Practice Question: Applying site reliability engineering practices
A team uses Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with cluster telemetry enabled. During an incident, they notice that a deployment's pods are repeatedly crashing with Exit Code 137. The team wants to investigate the root cause. Which two Google Cloud services should they use together to correlate resource usage and logs?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often mistakenly think that Cloud Trace, which can be linked to logs via trace context, qualifies as a logging service. However, the question specifically requires services that correlate resource usage and logs; Cloud Trace does not provide log data, only trace spans. Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging are the correct pair.
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
✓
Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging
Exit Code 137 indicates a container was killed by SIGKILL, typically due to an out-of-memory (OOM) condition. To correlate resource usage and logs, Cloud Monitoring provides resource usage metrics (e.g., memory, CPU), while Cloud Logging captures container termination logs and system events. Together, they allow correlation of spikes in resource usage with log entries to identify OOM kills. Cloud Trace is not primarily a logging service; it provides distributed tracing for latency analysis, but does not directly correlate logs with resource usage. Therefore, only Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging together (option A) satisfy the requirement.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging
Why this is correct
Correct. Cloud Monitoring provides resource usage metrics, and Cloud Logging provides logs. Together they allow correlation to identify OOM kills.
- ✗
Security Command Center and Cloud Logging
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. Security Command Center is for security posture management, not for resource usage monitoring or log correlation.
- ✗
Cloud Trace and Cloud Monitoring
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. Cloud Trace provides distributed tracing, not logs. Without Cloud Logging, logs cannot be correlated with resource usage.
- ✗
Cloud Error Reporting and Cloud Logging
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. Cloud Error Reporting surfaces application exceptions, but does not provide resource usage metrics or logs for correlation.
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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.