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.
You need to monitor the CPU utilization across all instances in a managed instance group. What is the most efficient way to create an alerting policy?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Create an alerting policy in Cloud Monitoring for the metric 'compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization'.
Option D is correct because Cloud Monitoring provides a pre-built metric, 'compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization', which directly measures CPU usage for VM instances. Creating an alerting policy based on this metric is the most efficient approach, as it requires no custom scripting or external scheduling, and integrates natively with managed instance groups to aggregate data across all instances.
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.
✗
Create an alerting policy using the Logs Explorer to parse instance logs.
Why it's wrong here
Inefficient; logs may not contain CPU metrics directly.
✗
Use Cloud Scheduler to call the monitoring API periodically.
Why it's wrong here
Overly complex; built-in alerting is simpler.
✗
Set up a cron job to run gcloud compute instances list and check CPU.
Why it's wrong here
Manual and not real-time.
✓
Create an alerting policy in Cloud Monitoring for the metric 'compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization'.
Why this is correct
Cloud Monitoring provides native CPU metrics for easy alerting.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between logs and metrics, and the trap here is that candidates may confuse log-based analysis (Option A) with metric-based alerting, or assume that custom scripting (Options B and C) is necessary when a native monitoring service already provides the required functionality.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
The metric 'compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization' is collected by the Cloud Monitoring agent or the guest OS-level monitoring service, and it represents the fraction of CPU time spent in non-idle states, sampled every 60 seconds. Alerting policies in Cloud Monitoring use a rolling window (e.g., 5 minutes) to evaluate the metric against a threshold, and can automatically scale with managed instance groups as instances are added or removed, without manual intervention.
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
An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.
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: Create an alerting policy in Cloud Monitoring for the metric 'compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization'. — Option D is correct because Cloud Monitoring provides a pre-built metric, 'compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization', which directly measures CPU usage for VM instances. Creating an alerting policy based on this metric is the most efficient approach, as it requires no custom scripting or external scheduling, and integrates natively with managed instance groups to aggregate data across all instances.
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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