Professional-Cloud-DevOps-Engineer Google Cloud Certified - Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Exam Free Practice Exam Questions (2026 Updated)

 The best option for selecting the machine type for the application to use that optimizes CPU utilization by using the fewest number of steps is to use the Recommender API and apply the suggested recommendations. The Recommender API is a service that provides recommendations for optimizing your Google Cloud resources, such as Compute Engine instances, disks, and firewalls. You can use the Recommender API to get recommendations for changing the machine type of your Compute Engine instances based on historical system metrics, such as CPU utilization. You can also apply the suggested recommendations by using the Recommender API or Cloud Console. This way, you can optimize CPU utilization by using the most suitable machine type for your application with minimal effort.

Your CTO has asked you to implement a postmortem policy on every incident for internal use. You want to define what a good postmortem is to ensure that the policy is successful at your company. What should you do?

Choose 2 answers

Ensure that all postmortems include what caused the incident, identify the person or team responsible for

causing the incident. and how to prevent a future occurrence of the incident.

Ensure that all postmortems include what caused the incident, how the incident could have been worse, and how to prevent a future occurrence of the incident.

Ensure that all postmortems include the severity of the incident, how to prevent a future occurrence of the incident. and what caused the incident without naming internal system components.

Ensure that all postmortems include how the incident was resolved and what caused the incident without naming customer information.

Ensure that all postmortems include all incident participants in postmortem authoring and share postmortems as widely as possible,

Answer: BE

The correct answers are B and E.

A good postmortem should include what caused the incident, how the incident could have been worse, and how to prevent a future occurrence of the incident1. This helps to identify the root cause of the problem, the impact of the incident, and the actions to take to mitigate or eliminate the risk of recurrence.

A good postmortem should also include all incident participants in postmortem authoring and share postmortems as widely as possible2. This helps to foster a culture of learning and collaboration, as well as to increase the visibility and accountability of the incident response process.

Answer A is incorrect because it assigns blame to a person or team, which goes against the principle of blameless postmortems2. Blameless postmortems focus on finding solutions rather than pointing fingers, and encourage honest and constructive feedback without fear of punishment.

Answer C is incorrect because it omits how the incident could have been worse, which is an important factor to consider when evaluating the severity and impact of the incident1. It also avoids naming internal system components, which makes it harder to understand the technical details and root cause of the problem.

Answer D is incorrect because it omits how to prevent a future occurrence of the incident, which is the main goal of a postmortem1. It also avoids naming customer information, which may be relevant for understanding the impact and scope of the incident.

Your uses Jenkins running on Google Cloud VM instances for CI/CD. You need to extend the functionality to use infrastructure as code automation by using Terraform. You must ensure that the Terraform Jenkins instance is authorized to create Google Cloud resources. You want to follow Google-recommended practices- What should you do?

Add the auth application-default command as a step in Jenkins before running the Terraform commands.

Create a dedicated service account for the Terraform instance. Download and copy the secret key value to the GOOGLE environment variable on the Jenkins server.

Confirm that the Jenkins VM instance has an attached service account with the appropriate Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions.

use the Terraform module so that Secret Manager can retrieve credentials.

Answer: C

The correct answer is C.

Confirming that the Jenkins VM instance has an attached service account with the appropriate Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions is the best way to ensure that the Terraform Jenkins instance is authorized to create Google Cloud resources.This follows the Google-recommended practice of using service accounts to authenticate and authorize applications running on Google Cloud1.Service accounts are associated with private keys that can be used to generate access tokens for Google Cloud APIs2.By attaching a service account to the Jenkins VM instance, Terraform can use the Application Default Credentials (ADC) strategy to automatically find and use the service account credentials3.

Answer A is incorrect because the auth application-default command is used to obtain user credentials, not service account credentials.User credentials are not recommended for applications running on Google Cloud, as they are less secure and less scalable than service account credentials1.

Answer B is incorrect because it involves downloading and copying the secret key value of the service account, which is not a secure or reliable way of managing credentials.The secret key value should be kept private and not exposed to any other system or user2. Moreover, setting the GOOGLE environment variable on the Jenkins server is not a valid way of providing credentials to Terraform.Terraform expects the credentials to be either in a file pointed by the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable, or in a provider block with the credentials argument3.

Answer D is incorrect because it involves using the Terraform module for Secret Manager, which is a service that stores and manages sensitive data such as API keys, passwords, and certificates. While Secret Manager can be used to store and retrieve credentials, it is not necessary or sufficient for authorizing the Terraform Jenkins instance. The Terraform Jenkins instance still needs a service account with the appropriate IAM permissions to access Secret Manager and other Google Cloud resources.

You are analyzing Java applications in production. All applications have Cloud Profiler and Cloud Trace installed and configured by default. You want to determine which applications need performance tuning. What should you do?

Choose 2 answers

A. Examine the wall-clock time and the CPU time Of the application. If the difference is substantial, increase the CPU resource allocation.

B. Examine the wall-clock time and the CPU time of the application. If the difference is substantial, increase the memory resource allocation.

C. 17 Examine the wall-clock time and the CPU time of the application. If the difference is substantial, increase the local disk storage allocation.

D. O Examine the latency time, the wall-clock time, and the CPU time of the application. If the latency time is slowly burning down the error budget, and the difference between wall-clock time and CPU time is minimal, mark the application for optimization.

E. Examine the heap usage Of the application. If the usage is low, mark the application for optimization.

Answer: AD

The correct answers are A and D.

Examine the wall-clock time and the CPU time of the application. If the difference is substantial, increase the CPU resource allocation. This is a good way to determine if the application is CPU-bound, meaning that it spends more time waiting for the CPU than performing actual computation.Increasing the CPU resource allocation can improve the performance of CPU-bound applications1.

Examine the latency time, the wall-clock time, and the CPU time of the application. If the latency time is slowly burning down the error budget, and the difference between wall-clock time and CPU time is minimal, mark the application for optimization. This is a good way to determine if the application is I/O-bound, meaning that it spends more time waiting for input/output operations than performing actual computation.Increasing the CPU resource allocation will not help I/O-bound applications, and they may need optimization to reduce the number or duration of I/O operations2.

Answer B is incorrect because increasing the memory resource allocation will not help if the application is CPU-bound or I/O-bound. Memory allocation affects how much data the application can store and access in memory, but it does not affect how fast the application can process that data.

Answer C is incorrect because increasing the local disk storage allocation will not help if the application is CPU-bound or I/O-bound. Disk storage affects how much data the application can store and access on disk, but it does not affect how fast the application can process that data.

Answer E is incorrect because examining the heap usage of the application will not help to determine if the application needs performance tuning. Heap usage affects how much memory the application allocates for dynamic objects, but it does not affect how fast the application can process those objects. Moreover, low heap usage does not necessarily mean that the application is inefficient or unoptimized.

You deployed an application into a large Standard Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster. The application is stateless and multiple pods run at the same time. Your application receives inconsistent traffic. You need to ensure that the user experience remains consistent regardless of changes in traffic. and that the resource usage of the cluster is optimized.

What should you do?

Configure a cron job to scale the deployment on a schedule.

Configure a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler.

Configure a Vertical Pod Autoscaler.

Configure cluster autoscaling on the node pool.

Answer: B

Comprehensive and Detailed 150 to 200 words of Explanation From Google Cloud DevOps guides documents:

To maintain a secure software supply chain, Google Cloud recommends enabling On-Demand Scanning and Continuous Analysis via the Artifact Analysis API. For Artifact Registry, you should enable automatic scanning, which scans images immediately upon upload. Crucially, your requirement asks for continuous scanning of existing images. Google Cloud’s Continuous Analysis does exactly this: it monitors vulnerability databases (like the CVE list) and automatically re-scans images stored in Artifact Registry whenever new threats are discovered. This ensures that an image that was "clean" last week is flagged immediately if a new zero-day vulnerability is identified today.

To address the requirement of tracking who pushed each image, Cloud Audit Logs is the standard tool. Every action in Artifact Registry, such as v1.repositories.images.create or v1.repositories.dockerImages.import, is recorded as an Administrative Write event. By inspecting these logs, security teams can identify the specific identity (service account or user email) associated with the push event. This combination of Continuous Analysis for threat detection and Cloud Audit Logs for traceability provides a robust security posture, minimizing administrative overhead compared to manual scripting or external storage solutions (Option D).

Cloud Build Private Pools allow your builds to run in a secure, isolated environment with direct access to resources inside your private VPC network, without exposing them to the public internet. This is the Google-recommended approach for minimizing management overhead while maintaining strong security boundaries.

From the official documentation:

"Private pools run your builds in a dedicated and secure environment that can connect to private network resources."

— Cloud Build Private Pools Overview

"You can configure private pools to access resources in a VPC network, which enables secure access to services without using public IPs."

— Accessing Private Resources

This method eliminates the need to create and manage additional compute instances or complex load balancing setups, providing seamless integration with your private services during CI pipeline execution.

The best way to prevent severe incidents from happening in the future is to ensure that test cases that catch errors of this type are run successfully before new software releases. This is aligned with the Site Reliability Engineering principle of testing for reliability.

The best option for storing and using the API key in your application by following Google-recommended practices is to save the API key in Secret Manager as a secret and reference the secret as an environment variable in the Cloud Run application. Secret Manager is a service that allows you to store and manage sensitive data, such as API keys, passwords, and certificates, in Google Cloud. A secret is a resource that represents a logical secret, such as an API key. You can save the API key in Secret Manager as a secret and use IAM policies to control who can access it. You can also reference the secret as an environment variable in the Cloud Run application by using the ${SECRET_NAME} syntax. This way, you can securely store and use the API key in your application without exposing it in your code or configuration files.

To restrict access to specific sensitive log fields (e.g. PII), Google Cloud offers Log field-level access control. You can apply field-level restrictions and then assign the Log Field Accessor role only to trusted personnel.

“You can use field-level access control to restrict access to certain fields in your logs. For example, you can restrict access to jsonPayload.user_email.”

— Cloud Logging Field-Level Access

“Grant the roles/logging.fieldAccessor role to principals that require access to these restricted fields.”

— Log Field Accessor Role

This lets your operations team continue using logs while ensuring that PII is only visible to the security team, fulfilling your compliance obligations.

https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/routing/overview

A change advisory board (CAB) is a traditional way of approving changes to a service, but it can slow down the software delivery performance and introduce bottlenecks. A better way to improve the speed and quality of changes is to use a peer-review based process for individual changes that is enforced at code check-in time and supported by automated tests. This way, developers can get fast feedback on the impact of their changes and catch any errors or bugs before they reach production. Additionally, the team’s development platform should enable developers to get fast feedback on the impact of their changes, such as using Cloud Code, Cloud Build, or Cloud Debugger.

 The best option for mitigating the incident impact on users and enabling the developers to troubleshoot the issue is to change the selector on the Service app-svc to app: my-app, version: blue. A Service is a resource that defines how to access a set of Pods. A selector is a field that specifies which Pods are selected by the Service. By changing the selector on the Service app-svc to app: my-app, version: blue, you can ensure that the Service only routes traffic to the Pods that have both labels app: my-app and version: blue. These Pods belong to the Deployment app-blue, which uses the previous version of the application. This way, you can mitigate the incident impact on users by switching back to the working version of the application. You can also enable the developers to troubleshoot the issue with the new version of the application in the Deployment app-green without affecting users.

The best option for storing all logs for one year and minimizing required code changes is to create a logs bucket and logging sink, set the retention on the logs bucket to 365 days, configure the logging sink to send logs to the bucket, and give your client access to the bucket to retrieve the logs. A logs bucket is a Cloud Storage bucket that is used to store logs from Cloud Logging. A logging sink is a resource that defines where log entries are sent, such as a logs bucket, BigQuery dataset, or Pub/Sub topic. You can create a logs bucket and logging sink in Cloud Logging and set the retention on the logs bucket to 365 days. This way, you can ensure that all logs are stored for one year and protected from deletion. You can also configure the logging sink to send logs from Cloud Run and Cloud Functions to the logs bucket without any code changes. You can then give your client access to the logs bucket by using IAM policies or signed URLs.

The easiest way to collect detailed metrics such as system resource utilization is to import the Stackdriver Profiler package, and configure it to relay function timing data to Stackdriver for further analysis. This way, you can use centralized GCP services without modifying your code or setting up additional tools.

The best option for preparing to handle the predicted growth is to verify the maximum node pool size, enable a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, and then perform a load test to verify your expected resource needs. The maximum node pool size is a parameter that specifies the maximum number of nodes that can be added to a node pool by the cluster autoscaler. You should verify that the maximum node pool size is sufficient to accommodate your expected growth rate and avoid hitting any quota limits. The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler is a feature that automatically adjusts the number of Pods in a deployment or replica set based on observed CPU utilization or custom metrics. You should enable a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler for your application to ensure that it runs enough Pods to handle the load. A load test is a test that simulates high user traffic and measures the performance and reliability of your application. You should perform a load test to verify your expected resource needs and identify any bottlenecks or issues.

Comprehensive and Detailed 150 to 200 words of Explanation From Google Cloud DevOps guides documents:

In incident management, the primary goal during the "Mitigation" phase is to restore service levels as quickly as possible, often referred to as "stopping the bleeding." Google Cloud’s SRE principles emphasize that during a high-priority incident, you should prioritize actions that have an immediate impact over long-term fixes or deep-dive forensics. While a rollback (Option C) is a standard procedure, the 15-minute CI/CD overhead is too slow when a critical payment service is failing. Using Cloud Profiler (Option A) is a diagnostic step that should be reserved for the post-mortem phase, not the heat of the outage.

Canceling the active Dataflow job (Option D) is the fastest way to alleviate the pressure on the shared Memorystore instance. Since the Dataflow pipeline is "non-critical" and "batch-based," stopping it has a low business impact compared to the payment service outage. Once the job is canceled, the write pressure on Redis drops instantly, reducing read latency and restoring the payment service to health. This aligns with the SRE practice of "shedding load" to protect critical system components. Once the immediate crisis is resolved, the team can then investigate the root cause and implement long-term fixes like rate limiting or resource isolation.

https://cloud.google.com/error-reporting/docs/formatting-error-messages

https://cloud.google.com/error-reporting/docs/reference/libraries#client-libraries-install-python

no need to install error reporting library on App Engine Flex.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From General Cloud Monitoring Knowledge:

The key requirement is to distinguish between failures in your own service and those caused by an underlying Google Cloud service.

A. Enable Personalized Service Health annotations on the dashboard: Google Cloud Personalized Service Health provides information about incidents affecting Google Cloud services that may impact your projects. When enabled and integrated with Monitoring, it can display these events as annotations on your dashboards, overlaying them on your service's metrics charts. This allows you to correlate dips in your service's performance with known Google Cloud service issues, directly addressing the need to distinguish failure origins.

B. Create an alerting policy for the system error metrics: Alerting policies are for notifications when metrics cross thresholds. While useful for detecting issues in your own service, they don't inherently distinguish the cause between your service and a Google Cloud dependency without further context, which option A provides.

C. Create a log-based metric to track cloud service errors, and display the metric on the dashboard: You could try to create log-based metrics from logs that might indicate a cloud service error (e.g., specific API error codes from Google Cloud services). However, this is indirect, might require complex parsing, and Personalized Service Health is a more direct and authoritative source for Google Cloud service disruptions.

D. Create a logs widget to display system errors from Cloud Logging on the dashboard: Similar to C, displaying raw system error logs can be helpful for troubleshooting your own service, but it doesn't provide a clear, curated view of whether a Google Cloud service itself is having an issue. It would require manual interpretation to link these logs to a potential Google Cloud outage.

Personalized Service Health is specifically designed to provide visibility into Google Cloud service incidents relevant to your resources. Integrating this with Monitoring dashboards is the most direct way to achieve the stated goal.

Reference (Based on Cloud Monitoring and Personalized Service Health features):

Personalized Service Health Overview: https://cloud.google.com/service-health/docs/overview

Integrating with Cloud Monitoring: Documentation often shows how to enable annotations for Personalized Service Health events on Monitoring charts. This allows a visual correlation between your service metrics and Google Cloud service health events."Personalized Service Health integrates with Cloud Monitoring so you can see service health events alongside your metrics."

"You can enable annotations on your metric charts to display relevant Personalized Service Health events."

This feature directly helps differentiate between issues in your application versus issues in the underlying Google Cloud services.