Google ACE Practice Question: Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution
This ACE practice question tests your understanding of ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution. Match the stated requirement to the specific cloud service, access model, or configuration option — many options are valid in isolation but not for this scenario. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A company wants to monitor the CPU utilization of their Compute Engine instances and receive an alert if utilization exceeds 80% for 5 minutes. Which services should they combine?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Pub/Sub.
Cloud Monitoring collects CPU utilization metrics from Compute Engine instances and can evaluate them against a threshold-based alerting policy. When the condition (CPU > 80% for 5 minutes) is met, the alert fires and sends a notification to a Cloud Pub/Sub topic, which can then trigger downstream actions such as sending emails or invoking serverless functions. This combination provides the metric ingestion, alert evaluation, and event-driven notification pipeline required for the use case.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
✗
Cloud Functions and Cloud Tasks.
Why it's wrong here
These are compute and task distribution services, not monitoring.
✗
Cloud Audit Logs and Cloud Storage.
Why it's wrong here
Audit logs are for compliance, not CPU monitoring.
✓
Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Pub/Sub.
Why this is correct
Cloud Monitoring collects metrics and sends alerts; Pub/Sub can be used for notifications.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Cloud Logging and Cloud Functions.
Why it's wrong here
Logging handles logs, not metrics; Cloud Functions could be triggered but is not the primary monitoring service.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between logging (Cloud Logging) and monitoring (Cloud Monitoring) — the trap here is that candidates confuse log-based metrics with native system metrics, assuming Cloud Logging can evaluate CPU thresholds when it can only parse log entries, not numeric time-series data.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Cloud Monitoring uses the Stackdriver Monitoring API to collect metric time series from the `compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization` metric, which is sampled every 60 seconds by default. The alerting policy evaluates a rolling 5-minute window using a `metricThreshold` condition with `duration: 300s`; when the condition is met, it publishes a notification to a Pub/Sub topic via a notification channel. In a real-world scenario, you might chain this with a Cloud Function subscribed to the Pub/Sub topic to automatically scale up an instance group or restart a misbehaving VM.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A media company stores terabytes of video archives that are accessed once a year for audit purposes. Moving these objects to a cold storage tier (Azure Archive, S3 Glacier, or Google Nearline) costs a fraction of hot storage. Questions like this test whether you understand storage tiers, access frequency tradeoffs, and retrieval latency requirements.
Related glossary terms
Concepts from this question explained
These glossary pages explain the core terms tested in this ACE question in full detail.
Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution — This question tests Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Pub/Sub. — Cloud Monitoring collects CPU utilization metrics from Compute Engine instances and can evaluate them against a threshold-based alerting policy. When the condition (CPU > 80% for 5 minutes) is met, the alert fires and sends a notification to a Cloud Pub/Sub topic, which can then trigger downstream actions such as sending emails or invoking serverless functions. This combination provides the metric ingestion, alert evaluation, and event-driven notification pipeline required for the use case.
What should I do if I get this ACE question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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