PCNE Configuring Network Services Practice Question
An engineer is deploying a Regional External HTTP(S) Load Balancer to serve a web application on Compute Engine. They want to maintain the highest availability by automatically rerouting traffic away from unhealthy instances. Which additional configuration is required?
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
✓
Configure a health check on the backend service
Health checks are required to detect unhealthy instances. Without them, the load balancer will route traffic to any instance in the backend service. Autoscaling and managed instance groups are not mandatory for basic health checking but are recommended.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable connection draining on the backend service
Why it's wrong here
Connection draining allows existing connections to complete, but does not detect health.
- ✗
Use a global load balancer instead
Why it's wrong here
Global load balancers also require health checks for automatic rerouting.
- ✓
Configure a health check on the backend service
Why this is correct
Health checks allow the load balancer to mark instances unhealthy and stop sending traffic.
- ✗
Set up a managed instance group with autoscaling
Why it's wrong here
Autoscaling helps with capacity but does not automatically reroute traffic from unhealthy instances without health checks.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
One of 961 original PCNE practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. 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.