PCDOE Implementing service monitoring strategies Practice Question
You are the DevOps engineer for a large gaming company. Your game backend runs on Compute Engine instances behind a global HTTP(S) Load Balancer. You have set up Cloud Monitoring with an uptime check for the load balancer's IP address, and you are using logging to capture 404 errors. Recently, a new game update caused a surge in traffic, and you started receiving many alerts from your uptime check indicating that the site is down. However, you verify that the backend instances are healthy and the load balancer is responding correctly, though some requests are timing out due to the increased load. Your alerting policy currently triggers when 2 consecutive checks fail. What is the most likely reason for the false positive alerts?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between health checks (which verify backend instance health) and uptime checks (which verify end-to-end availability from a monitoring perspective), leading candidates to confuse a healthy backend with a successful uptime check response.
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
✓
The uptime check's timeout is too short for the current response times.
The uptime check's timeout is too short for the current response times. When a surge in traffic causes some requests to time out, the load balancer may still respond correctly to most requests, but the uptime check—which has a fixed timeout (default 10 seconds)—fails if the response does not arrive within that window. Since the alert triggers after 2 consecutive failures, the check falsely reports the site as down even though the backend and load balancer are healthy.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The global load balancer's health check is failing due to the surge.
Why it's wrong here
Health checks are separate; if they fail, load balancer would stop routing, but traffic is still flowing.
- ✗
The monitoring project has reached its limit for concurrent uptime checks.
Why it's wrong here
Limits would prevent checks from running, not cause false failures.
- ✗
The uptime check is configured to check a specific URL that is returning a 503 status code.
Why it's wrong here
A 503 indicates actual server error, but backend is healthy, so unlikely.
- ✓
The uptime check's timeout is too short for the current response times.
Why this is correct
During traffic surge, response time increases; if timeout is too short, check fails despite site being up.
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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.