Question

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