PCNE Practice Question: Managing, Monitoring, and Optimising Network Operations
An organization wants to mirror all traffic from a set of Compute Engine instances to a third-party IDS appliance running on a separate instance in the same VPC. The IDS appliance must receive a copy of both ingress and egress traffic without impacting production traffic. Which Google Cloud service should they use?
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
Packet Mirroring copies traffic from source instances (mirror source) to a collector (IDS appliance) for monitoring. It is designed for this purpose without affecting production.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Firewall Insights
Why it's wrong here
Firewall Insights provides analytics, not packet copies.
- ✗
VPC Flow Logs
Why it's wrong here
VPC Flow Logs provide summaries, not full packet copies.
- ✓
Packet Mirroring
Why this is correct
Packet Mirroring copies all traffic to a collector for deep packet inspection.
- ✗
Cloud NAT logging
Why it's wrong here
Cloud NAT logging only logs NAT events.
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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.