This GCDL practice question tests your understanding of scaling with google cloud operations. Read the scenario carefully and evaluate each option against the stated constraints before committing to an answer. 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 implement SLOs for their API service. They need to measure the proportion of successful requests over a 30-day window. Which metric should they use?
availability (uptime)
Why wrong: Uptime does not account for errors in responses.
latency at 99th percentile
Why wrong: Latency measures performance, not success rate.
requests/success
Why wrong: Not a meaningful metric; need ratio of good to total.
SLI = good events / total events
SLI directly measures the proportion of successful requests.
Answer choices
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
SLI = good events / total events
Option D is correct because an SLI (Service Level Indicator) is defined as the ratio of good events to total events, which directly measures the proportion of successful requests over a 30-day window. This aligns with the requirement to track request success rate, not just system uptime. In Google Cloud operations, SLOs are built on SLIs that count discrete events like HTTP 200 responses versus all requests.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
availability (uptime)
Why it's wrong here
Uptime does not account for errors in responses.
latency at 99th percentile
Why it's wrong here
Latency measures performance, not success rate.
requests/success
Why it's wrong here
Not a meaningful metric; need ratio of good to total.
SLI = good events / total events
Why this is correct
SLI directly measures the proportion of successful requests.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
The trap here is that candidates confuse availability (uptime) with request success rate, not realizing that a service can be 'up' 100% of the time yet fail a large proportion of requests due to application errors.
Detailed technical explanation
An SLI for request success typically counts HTTP status codes in the 2xx range as 'good events' and all responses (including 4xx and 5xx) as 'total events' over a rolling 30-day window. Google Cloud's Monitoring service uses this ratio to compute burn rates for SLO alerts, where a 99.9% SLO means no more than 0.1% of requests can fail. A subtle behavior is that client-side errors (4xx) may be excluded from 'good events' depending on the SLO definition, as they often reflect client misconfiguration rather than service health.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
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.
What to study next
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FAQ
Scaling with Google Cloud operations — This question tests Scaling with Google Cloud operations — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
The correct answer is: SLI = good events / total events — Option D is correct because an SLI (Service Level Indicator) is defined as the ratio of good events to total events, which directly measures the proportion of successful requests over a 30-day window. This aligns with the requirement to track request success rate, not just system uptime. In Google Cloud operations, SLOs are built on SLIs that count discrete events like HTTP 200 responses versus all requests.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Last reviewed: Jun 25, 2026
This GCDL 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 GCDL exam.
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