hardMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped
PDE Practice Question: A data pipeline ingests real-time events from…
A data pipeline ingests real-time events from Cloud Pub/Sub into BigQuery using Dataflow. The pipeline uses a sliding window of 5 minutes with a 1-minute period to aggregate event counts. Recently, the pipeline started failing with 'The worker failed to provide a heartbeat.' The Dataflow logs show high CPU usage on the workers. What is the best course of action to resolve the issue?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the misconception that reducing workers or changing window types is a universal fix for resource exhaustion, when in fact the immediate solution for heartbeat failures due to high CPU is to scale out the worker pool.
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
✓
Increase the number of workers and enable autoscaling to distribute the load.
The 'worker failed to provide a heartbeat' error combined with high CPU usage indicates that workers are overloaded and cannot process data fast enough to maintain their heartbeat to the Dataflow service. Increasing the number of workers and enabling autoscaling distributes the computational load across more machines, reducing per-worker CPU pressure and allowing heartbeats to be sent on time. This directly addresses the root cause of resource exhaustion.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Increase the number of workers and enable autoscaling to distribute the load.
Why this is correct
More workers can handle the CPU load from streaming inserts.
- ✗
Reduce the number of workers to minimize coordination overhead.
Why it's wrong here
Reducing workers may increase load per worker and exacerbate CPU issues.
- ✗
Use a global window with a trigger to reduce state size.
Why it's wrong here
Global window is not suitable for aggregation and may cause even larger state.
- ✗
Change the windowing to a fixed 5-minute window to reduce computations.
Why it's wrong here
Changing window type does not address the heartbeat failure cause.
Visual reference
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This PDE question is part of Courseiva's 890-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 PDE 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 PDE exam.