Medium — ACE Practice Quiz

Question 1

A startup is deploying a stateless Python web application that receives highly variable traffic, including long idle periods overnight. The team has no operations staff and wants a fully managed platform that automatically scales down to zero instances when there is no traffic to minimize cost, while requiring the least configuration effort. Which compute option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

App Engine standard environment with automatic scaling

Answer

A Compute Engine managed instance group with autoscaling based on CPU utilization

Answer

A GKE Standard cluster running the app as a Deployment with a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler

Answer

App Engine flexible environment with automatic scaling

Question 2

A critical firewall rule protecting your production VPC was unexpectedly deleted, causing a brief security exposure. Your security team asks you to identify exactly which user or service account deleted the firewall rule and when. Which Google Cloud audit log type should you examine to find this information?

Accepted Answer

Admin Activity audit logs

Answer

Data Access audit logs

Answer

System Event audit logs

Answer

Policy Denied audit logs

Question 3

A financial analytics company is building a platform that ingests millions of stock trade events per second and must support single-digit millisecond read latency for key-based lookups. The access pattern is always by a row key (symbol + timestamp), and the total dataset is expected to grow into the hundreds of terabytes. The team does not need SQL joins or ACID multi-row transactions. Which Google Cloud data service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with high-availability configuration

Answer

BigQuery with streaming inserts

Answer

Firestore in Native mode

Question 4

Your company's finance team wants a specific employee, Maria, to be able to create new Cloud Billing accounts for different departments directly under the organization. Maria should not receive broad administrative rights over the organization itself. Which action grants Maria the minimum access needed to create new billing accounts?

Accepted Answer

Grant Maria the Billing Account Creator role (roles/billing.creator) at the organization level

Answer

Grant Maria the Organization Administrator role (roles/resourcemanager.organizationAdmin) at the organization level

Answer

Grant Maria the Billing Account Administrator role (roles/billing.admin) on an existing billing account

Answer

Grant Maria the Billing Account User role (roles/billing.user) at the organization level

Question 5

Your company acquired a small startup that has one Google Cloud project running production workloads under its own separate billing account. Finance wants the acquired project's charges to appear on your organization's existing billing account starting next month, with no downtime for the running resources. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

In the acquired project's billing settings, change the billing account to your organization's billing account, ensuring you have the Billing Account Administrator role on the target account and Project Billing Manager on the project.

Answer

Delete the acquired project and recreate it under your organization's billing account, then redeploy all resources.

Answer

Close the startup's billing account, which will automatically reassign its linked projects to your organization's billing account.

Answer

Export the startup's billing data to a BigQuery dataset in your organization so the charges consolidate onto your billing account.

Question 6

Your company has a single Cloud Billing account managed by the finance team. A project lead named Priya needs the ability to link the new projects she creates to the existing billing account, but finance does not want her to be able to modify billing account settings, view all account cost data across the organization, or manage other users' billing roles. Following least privilege, which IAM role should you grant Priya on the billing account?

Accepted Answer

Billing Account User (roles/billing.user)

Answer

Billing Account Administrator (roles/billing.admin)

Answer

Billing Account Viewer (roles/billing.viewer)

Answer

Project Billing Manager (roles/billing.projectManager)

Question 7

Your finance team lead needs to view and download the monthly invoices and payment history for your organization's billing account, but she should not be able to modify billing settings, link projects, or change the payment method. You want to follow the principle of least privilege. Which IAM role should you grant her on the billing account?

Accepted Answer

Billing Account Viewer

Answer

Billing Account Administrator

Answer

Billing Account User

Answer

Billing Account Costs Manager

Question 8

Your finance team wants automated cost controls for a development project. When the project's spending reaches its monthly budget, an internal system must automatically trigger a script that disables billing on the project to prevent further charges. You are configuring the budget in the Google Cloud console. Which budget setting must you enable so your automation can react to budget threshold events programmatically?

Accepted Answer

Connect a Pub/Sub topic to the budget so threshold notifications are published as messages

Answer

Add the finance team's email addresses to the budget's email notification recipients

Answer

Enable a Cloud Monitoring notification channel on the budget alert

Answer

Set the budget scope to the entire billing account instead of a single project

Question 9

Your finance team wants detailed, near-real-time billing data (including labels and per-SKU usage) available for SQL analysis. As the project owner with the required billing permissions, what is the correct way to make this data continuously available?

Accepted Answer

In Billing > Billing export, enable Detailed usage cost export and select a BigQuery dataset as the destination

Answer

Manually download the monthly CSV invoice from the billing console and upload it to a Cloud Storage bucket each month

Answer

Create a Cloud Monitoring dashboard that charts the billing account's spend metrics for the finance team

Answer

Run 'gcloud billing accounts list' on a daily schedule and pipe the output into a BigQuery table

Question 10

Your finance team wants to perform detailed, granular analysis of Google Cloud spending using SQL queries, including custom dashboards that break down costs by label and SKU over time. They need the raw, itemized billing data available for querying. As the Associate Cloud Engineer, what should you configure to meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Configure Cloud Billing data export to a BigQuery dataset.

Answer

Set up a Cloud Billing budget with alert thresholds and enable programmatic notifications via Pub/Sub.

Answer

Export the billing reports as CSV files from the Cost Table page each month.

Answer

Enable Cloud Billing data export to a Cloud Storage bucket in Parquet format.

Question 11

Your finance team wants to build a chargeback report in BigQuery that combines resource usage costs with the current list prices for each SKU so they can model potential savings from committed use discounts. You have already enabled standard usage cost export to BigQuery. What additional configuration must you perform in the Cloud Billing console?

Accepted Answer

Enable the pricing data export to the same or another BigQuery dataset for the billing account

Answer

Enable detailed usage cost export, which automatically includes SKU list prices

Answer

Grant the finance team the Billing Account Viewer role so pricing appears in the usage export table

Answer

Create a Cloud Monitoring metric that scrapes SKU prices and writes them to BigQuery

Question 12

Your organization has a single billing account linked to 40 projects. The finance team wants to identify which specific project incurred the highest Compute Engine costs last month, and they want to do this directly in the Cloud Console without setting up any external tooling or exports. What is the most direct way to provide this information?

Accepted Answer

Open the Billing account's Reports page and group costs by project, then filter by the Compute Engine service.

Answer

Enable a BigQuery billing export and write a SQL query that aggregates cost by project.

Answer

Create a separate budget with alerts for each of the 40 projects and compare the alert thresholds.

Answer

Ask each project owner to open the project's Compute Engine dashboard and report their monthly spend.

Question 13

Your finance team wants to be notified before a project's monthly spending exceeds its allocated budget, not just after the actual costs cross the threshold. They want an alert triggered when the projected end-of-month cost is expected to reach 100% of the $5,000 budget. As the Cloud Engineer, how should you configure this in a Cloud Billing budget?

Accepted Answer

Create a budget of $5,000 and add an alert threshold rule based on forecasted spend set to 100%.

Answer

Create a budget of $5,000 and add an alert threshold rule based on actual spend set to 100%.

Answer

Set a budget of $5,000 and configure a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy on the billing metric with a 100% forecasted threshold.

Answer

Create a budget of $5,000 and enable programmatic budget notifications to Pub/Sub, then write a Cloud Function to predict spend.

Question 14

A manufacturing company is deploying thousands of IoT sensors that will emit device metrics at very high throughput (hundreds of thousands of writes per second). The team needs a fully managed database optimized for time-series and high-volume single-key lookups, with low-latency reads and writes, that can scale horizontally. Which Google Cloud data service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL

Answer

Firestore in Native mode

Answer

BigQuery

Question 15

Your company is decommissioning an old development project. Finance wants to ensure no further charges accrue for the resources in that specific project, but the same billing account is still actively used by dozens of other production projects. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Disable billing on the individual project by unlinking it from the billing account.

Answer

Close the entire billing account so that all charges stop immediately.

Answer

Set a budget of $0 with an alert threshold on the billing account.

Answer

Remove the Billing Account User role from all members of the project.

Question 16

Your company runs several internal microservices on Compute Engine VMs within a single VPC network. Developers need to reach these services using friendly hostnames like api.internal.example.com instead of internal IP addresses, and these names must NOT be resolvable from the public internet. What should you configure?

Accepted Answer

Create a Cloud DNS private managed zone for internal.example.com and authorize the VPC network to use it

Answer

Create a Cloud DNS public managed zone for internal.example.com and add A records for each service

Answer

Add entries mapping each hostname to its internal IP in the /etc/hosts file of every VM manually

Answer

Register internal.example.com with an external domain registrar and point it to the VMs' external IPs

Question 17

Your team runs a photo-sharing app. Whenever a user uploads an original image to a Cloud Storage bucket, you must automatically generate a thumbnail and write it to a second bucket. The processing code takes a few seconds per image, there is no steady traffic pattern, and the team wants to avoid managing any servers or clusters. Which compute option best fits this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Deploy a Cloud Function triggered by the Cloud Storage object finalize event.

Answer

Create a Compute Engine managed instance group that polls the bucket for new objects.

Answer

Run a GKE Standard cluster with a Deployment that watches the bucket.

Answer

Deploy the code to App Engine standard and configure a cron job to scan the bucket every minute.

Question 18

Your security team needs to retain and analyze all Cloud Audit Logs from a production project for at least two years, and they want to run SQL queries against the log data to investigate access patterns. By default, admin activity logs are only retained for 400 days in Cloud Logging. What should you configure to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Create a log sink in Cloud Logging that exports the audit logs to a BigQuery dataset.

Answer

Increase the retention period of the _Default log bucket to 730 days.

Answer

Create a log-based metric for the audit logs and build a Cloud Monitoring dashboard.

Answer

Enable Data Access audit logs and download the entries manually each month.

Question 19

Your compliance team requires that application logs for a production project be retained for 400 days, but the default _Default log bucket in Cloud Logging keeps logs for only 30 days. You want to meet the requirement with the least ongoing operational effort and without exporting logs to another service. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Edit the retention period of the _Default log bucket (or create a custom log bucket) and set it to 400 days.

Answer

Create a Pub/Sub sink that streams all logs to a Cloud Function that writes them to a Cloud Storage bucket with a 400-day lifecycle rule.

Answer

Create a scheduled Cloud Run job that copies logs from Cloud Logging to BigQuery every night and deletes them after 400 days.

Answer

Enable Data Access audit logs on the project so that logs are automatically retained for one year.

Question 20

Your team runs a fleet of Compute Engine VMs and needs Cloud Monitoring dashboards to show detailed guest-level metrics such as disk I/O and process-level CPU usage. Currently the dashboards only display default hypervisor-level metrics like network traffic and disk throughput reported by the VM instance. What should you do to collect the additional guest-level metrics?

Accepted Answer

Install and configure the Ops Agent on each VM instance.

Answer

Enable Cloud Monitoring at the project level in the Cloud Console.

Answer

Create a log-based metric that extracts disk I/O values from the system logs.

Answer

Grant the Monitoring Viewer role to the VM service account.

Question 21

Your team runs a fleet of IoT gateway devices that push a custom metric named 'device/heartbeat' to Cloud Monitoring every 60 seconds. Operations wants to be paged automatically if any device stops reporting its heartbeat entirely, indicating the gateway has gone offline. What is the most appropriate way to configure this alerting policy in Cloud Monitoring?

Accepted Answer

Create an alerting policy with a metric-absence condition on 'device/heartbeat', grouped by device, that triggers when data is missing for a chosen duration.

Answer

Create a metric-threshold alerting policy that fires when 'device/heartbeat' is greater than 0 for 5 minutes.

Answer

Create an uptime check pointed at each device's IP address and alert when the check fails.

Answer

Create a log-based metric that counts heartbeat log entries and alert when the count exceeds a threshold.

Question 22

You operate a fleet of Compute Engine VMs behind a load balancer. Operations wants to be paged only when BOTH average CPU utilization exceeds 85% AND request latency exceeds 500ms for a sustained 5-minute window, to avoid noisy alerts during isolated spikes. Using Cloud Monitoring, what is the correct way to configure this?

Accepted Answer

Create a single alerting policy with two conditions and set the policy trigger to fire only when all conditions are met (combined with AND logic).

Answer

Create two separate alerting policies, one for CPU and one for latency, each with its own notification channel.

Answer

Create a single alerting policy with two conditions and set the trigger to fire when any condition is met (OR logic).

Answer

Create a log-based metric that counts high-CPU log entries and alert when the count exceeds a threshold.

Question 23

Your team runs a fleet of Compute Engine VMs behind Cloud Monitoring. You created an alerting policy on CPU utilization that fires every time a brief scheduled cron job spikes CPU above 90% for a few seconds, generating dozens of false pages each night. You want to reduce these transient alerts without raising the threshold value. What should you configure on the alerting condition?

Accepted Answer

Increase the retest window (duration) so the condition must remain violated for a sustained period before the alert triggers

Answer

Change the notification channel from PagerDuty to email so alerts arrive less urgently

Answer

Add a log-based metric that counts cron job executions and alert on that instead

Answer

Reduce the alerting policy's auto-close duration so alerts resolve faster

Question 24

Your team runs a fleet of Compute Engine VMs hosting a memory-intensive application. In Cloud Monitoring you can see CPU utilization for each VM, but you cannot find any memory usage metrics to build a dashboard chart. What must you do to collect and visualize per-VM memory utilization?

Accepted Answer

Install the Ops Agent on the VMs so that memory metrics are collected and reported to Cloud Monitoring.

Answer

Enable the Compute Engine API in the project to expose additional built-in memory metrics.

Answer

Create a log-based metric that parses memory values from the serial console output.

Answer

Grant the Monitoring Viewer role to the VM service account so it can publish memory data.

Question 25

Your operations team manages hundreds of Compute Engine VMs across several environments. VMs are tagged with a label 'env' set to values like 'prod', 'staging', or 'dev'. You want a single Cloud Monitoring construct that automatically includes any new VM tagged 'env:prod' so dashboards and alerting policies always reflect the current production fleet without manual updates. What should you configure?

Accepted Answer

Create a Monitoring group with a membership criterion that matches the label 'env = prod'.

Answer

Create a static list of resource names in each alerting policy and update it whenever a VM is added.

Answer

Create a log-based metric filtered on the 'env' label and build the dashboard from that metric.

Answer

Create separate custom dashboards per VM and use dashboard folders to organize them.