mediumMultiple Choice
PDE Practice Question: Refer to the exhibit
Exhibit
{
"alertName": "High Error Rate",
"condition": {
"conditionThreshold": {
"filter": "metric.type=\"logging.googleapis.com/user/my-app-error-count\"",
"aggregations": [
{
"alignmentPeriod": "60s",
"perSeriesAligner": "ALIGN_RATE"
}
],
"duration": "60s",
"comparison": "COMPARISON_GT",
"threshold": 10
}
},
"documentation": {},
"notificationChannels": []
}Refer to the exhibit. A team configured a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy as shown. They recently started receiving false positive alerts. What is the most likely cause?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google often tests the distinction between alignment period (how data is aggregated) and duration (how long the condition must persist), tempting candidates to blame the alignment period when the real issue is the insufficient duration.
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
✓
The duration of 60 seconds is too short, making the alert sensitive to brief spikes.
A 60-second duration means the alert fires if the condition is met for just one minute. This is too short to distinguish transient spikes from sustained issues, causing false positives. Increasing the duration would require the metric to breach the threshold for a longer, more meaningful period.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
The duration of 60 seconds is too short, making the alert sensitive to brief spikes.
Why this is correct
A 60-second duration means the condition need only hold briefly before firing, so short transient spikes breach the threshold and trigger alerts. Lengthening duration requires sustained violation, filtering brief spikes that do not represent genuine incidents.
- ✗
The alignment period of 60 seconds is too short, causing noise.
Why it's wrong here
A 60-second alignment period on a rate metric is normal and does not itself generate false positives. Shortening alignment reduces latency, not noise. The exhibit's actual cause lies elsewhere, such as a misconfigured threshold or aggregator.
- ✗
The threshold of 10 is too low.
Why it's wrong here
A threshold of 10 may be entirely appropriate for the metric's normal range; raising it would mask genuine breaches rather than fix false positives. Threshold tuning addresses sensitivity, but the exhibit's actual misconfiguration lies in another setting.
- ✗
The aggregator should be ALIGN_SUM instead of ALIGN_RATE.
Why it's wrong here
ALIGN_RATE computes a per-second rate, which is correct for counter metrics; switching to ALIGN_SUM would aggregate raw counter values and distort the signal. The false positives stem from another configuration element, not the aggregator choice.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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