This PCDOE practice question tests your understanding of implementing service monitoring strategies. 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 health of an external HTTP endpoint. Which resource should you create?
Load balancer with a health probe
Why wrong: This is for internal traffic routing, not external monitoring.
Internal health check in Compute Engine
Why wrong: Internal health checks are for load-balanced backends, not external endpoints.
Uptime check in Cloud Monitoring
Uptime checks monitor external endpoints for availability.
Cloud Logging log-based metric
Why wrong: Log-based metrics count log entries, not endpoint health.
Answer choices
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
Uptime check in Cloud Monitoring
To monitor the health of an external HTTP endpoint, you need a service that can reach the endpoint from outside your VPC and provide alerting and visibility. Cloud Monitoring's Uptime Check is specifically designed for this purpose: it verifies that an external HTTP(S) endpoint is reachable and responsive, and can trigger alerting policies based on the results. This is the correct resource because it operates from Google's infrastructure, not from within your project, and directly supports external endpoint monitoring.
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.
Load balancer with a health probe
Why it's wrong here
This is for internal traffic routing, not external monitoring.
Internal health check in Compute Engine
Why it's wrong here
Internal health checks are for load-balanced backends, not external endpoints.
Uptime check in Cloud Monitoring
Why this is correct
Uptime checks monitor external endpoints for availability.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Cloud Logging log-based metric
Why it's wrong here
Log-based metrics count log entries, not endpoint health.
Common exam traps
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between internal health checks (for VMs/backends) and external uptime checks (for public endpoints), so the trap here is that candidates confuse a load balancer health probe (which checks backends) with a tool for monitoring an external HTTP endpoint.
Detailed technical explanation
Uptime checks in Cloud Monitoring use Google's global infrastructure to send HTTP(S) requests to your endpoint from multiple locations (e.g., us-west1, europe-west1) at configurable intervals (e.g., 60 seconds). They support SSL/TLS validation, response content matching, and custom headers, and can be integrated with alerting policies to notify you of failures. A common subtlety is that uptime checks measure availability from Google's perspective, not from a user's specific geographic region, which can lead to false positives if the endpoint is geo-blocked or has regional DNS resolution issues.
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
Implementing service monitoring strategies — This question tests Implementing service monitoring strategies — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
The correct answer is: Uptime check in Cloud Monitoring — To monitor the health of an external HTTP endpoint, you need a service that can reach the endpoint from outside your VPC and provide alerting and visibility. Cloud Monitoring's Uptime Check is specifically designed for this purpose: it verifies that an external HTTP(S) endpoint is reachable and responsive, and can trigger alerting policies based on the results. This is the correct resource because it operates from Google's infrastructure, not from within your project, and directly supports external endpoint monitoring.
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 30, 2026
This PCDOE 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 PCDOE exam.
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