PCNE Practice Question: Managing, Monitoring, and Optimising Network Operations
A security team needs to capture all traffic to and from a specific Compute Engine instance for forensic analysis. They want to send the mirrored traffic to a third-party IDS appliance running on a separate VM in the same VPC. Which GCP feature should they use, and what is a key consideration?
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
✓
Packet Mirroring, and the collector must be in the same VPC network as the mirrored instance
Packet Mirroring allows copying all traffic from a source instance (the mirrored instance) and sending it to a collector. A key consideration is that the collector must be in the same VPC network and must not be the same instance as the source.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Packet Mirroring, and the collector must be in the same VPC network as the mirrored instance
Why this is correct
Packet Mirroring copies all packets; collector must be in same VPC.
- ✗
Firewall Rules Logging, which logs allow/deny events
Why it's wrong here
Firewall logs are metadata, not full packets.
- ✗
VPC Flow Logs, since logs are stored in Stackdriver and can be exported
Why it's wrong here
Flow Logs provide metadata, not full packet payloads needed for IDS.
- ✗
Cloud NAT logging, which logs all outbound connections
Why it's wrong here
NAT logs only outbound connections, not full packet capture.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This PCNE question is part of Courseiva's 961-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PCNE 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 PCNE exam.