PCSE Practice Question: Managing Operations in a Cloud Solution Environment
During an incident response, a security engineer needs to analyze a Pub/Sub message that was produced by a Cloud Function triggered by a SCC finding. The message has been acknowledged and deleted from the subscription. How can the engineer retrieve the message again?
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
✓
Use the 'gcloud pubsub subscriptions seek' command with a snapshot or timestamp to replay the message.
Pub/Sub supports message replay by seeking a snapshot or a timestamp. This allows reprocessing messages that have been acknowledged. There is no 'dead-letter queue' for this scenario. Cloud Logging logs the message payload if configured, but not by default.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Submit a support ticket to Google to recover the message from internal storage.
Why it's wrong here
Google does not recover individual messages.
- ✗
Check the Cloud Function logs to view the message payload.
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Function logs may or may not include the full message payload depending on logging configuration.
- ✗
Create a new subscription to the same topic and enable 'retain_acked_messages' before the message was published.
Why it's wrong here
Retention must be configured before messages are published; after they are deleted, they cannot be recovered unless a snapshot was taken.
- ✓
Use the 'gcloud pubsub subscriptions seek' command with a snapshot or timestamp to replay the message.
Why this is correct
Seek allows replaying messages from a specific point, including acked messages if a snapshot was taken or retention is enabled.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PCSE 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 PCSE exam.