Free Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer exam Practice Questions

Sample Practice Questions

Try these 10 sample questions from the Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer exam practice bank. Each includes the answer and explanation. Continue with the interactive practice above to review the full question set.

1. 1A department needs a policy inheritance point for several application projects and nested team groupings. Which resource should it use below the organization?

   1. A. A folder containing the team's projects and subfolders
   2. B. A project containing the team's projects and subfolders
   3. C. A billing account containing the team's project hierarchy
   4. D. A VPC network containing the team's project hierarchy

   Answer: A

   Explanation: Google states, "Because folders can contain projects and other folders," and describes folders as policy inheritance points. A folder provides the requested nested grouping; projects, billing accounts, and networks do not supply that hierarchy.

   Reference: About resource hierarchy — The folder resource

2. 2A Cloud Build trigger watches pushes to a repository branch. A developer commits locally but does not push. Why has the trigger not started a build?

   1. A. Branch triggers require a new repository tag for every commit.
   2. B. Branch triggers start only after a pull request is merged manually.
   3. C. The trigger responds to remote-origin pushes rather than local changes.
   4. D. The trigger requires changing the build configuration on every commit.

   Answer: C

   Explanation: Google states, "builds are only invoked on pushes to the remote origin -- not on local changes," for branch- or tag-commit triggers. A local commit has not produced the configured event.

   Reference: Create and manage build triggers — Create a build trigger — Event — branch and tag trigger note

3. 3A service team measures the fraction of valid requests that return successfully over a defined window. What role does that quantitative measurement play?

   1. A. An SLA penalty
   2. B. An SLO target
   3. C. An SLI
   4. D. An error-budget release policy

   Answer: C

   Explanation: Google defines an SLI as "a carefully defined quantitative measure of some aspect of the level of service that is provided." The measured success fraction is the indicator; its desired target and contractual consequence are separate.

   Reference: Site Reliability Engineering — Service Level Objectives — Service Level Terminology — Indicators

4. 4Which description of the Ops Agent meets a Compute Engine team's requirement for unified telemetry collection?

   1. A. It collects VM metrics, while application logs require the legacy Logging agent.
   2. B. It collects VM logs, while metrics require the legacy Monitoring agent.
   3. C. It collects logs and metrics, while traces require a separate agent process.
   4. D. It combines logs, metrics, and traces in one process with unified configuration.

   Answer: D

   Explanation: Google describes the Ops Agent as "Combining the collection of logs, metrics, and traces into a single process," with unified YAML configuration. The other descriptions incorrectly limit the integrated signal collection or require separate legacy agents.

   Reference: Ops Agent overview — Overview — telemetry collection

5. 5A team needs ongoing production measurements that attribute CPU use and memory allocations to application source code with low overhead. Which tool provides this?

   1. A. Cloud Trace
   2. B. Cloud Monitoring
   3. C. Cloud Profiler
   4. D. Error Reporting

   Answer: C

   Explanation: Google describes Cloud Profiler as "a statistical, low-overhead profiler that continuously gathers CPU usage and memory-allocation information from your production applications." Its source-code resource attribution fits the task. Distributed traces, metric charts and error-event grouping do not provide that continuous code-level CPU/allocation profile.

   Reference: Cloud Profiler overview — Overview — continuous profiling

6. 6An IAM role granted on a department folder should cover its current child projects. How does the resource hierarchy handle that grant?

   1. A. It applies only to the folder's metadata.
   2. B. It requires a separate binding on every child project.
   3. C. It is inherited by the folder's child projects.
   4. D. It applies only after the projects are recreated.

   Answer: C

   Explanation: The documentation states, "IAM roles granted on a folder resource are inherited by all project and folder resources in that folder." Child projects therefore inherit the grant without recreation or duplicate bindings.

   Reference: About resource hierarchy — The folder resource

7. 7A Cloud Build branch trigger must match exactly the branch main, excluding names such as main-old and domain. Which regular expression should be used?

   1. A. ^main$
   2. B. ^main[a-z-]*$
   3. C. ^[a-z]*main$
   4. D. ^(main|domain)$

   Answer: A

   Explanation: Cloud Build specifies regular-expression branch matching. RE2 defines ^ as "at beginning of text or line (m=true)" and $ as "at end of text (like \z not \Z) or line (m=true)". Anchoring the literal main at both boundaries matches only that branch. The character-class patterns also allow main-old or domain; the alternation explicitly allows domain.

   Reference: Create and manage build triggers — Create a build trigger — Branch or Tag

8. 8A team sets a target that 99.9% of eligible requests succeed within a calendar month. Which term describes this target for the measured service level?

   1. A. A service level objective
   2. B. A service level indicator's observed value
   3. C. A contractual service credit
   4. D. A measured error-budget consumption rate

   Answer: A

   Explanation: Google defines an SLO as "a target value or range of values for a service level that is measured by an SLI." The target is an objective; measured performance, financial consequences, and consumption rate are distinct.

   Reference: Site Reliability Engineering — Service Level Objectives — Service Level Terminology — Objectives

9. 9An application writes text logs containing identifiable fields. The team needs structured entries in Cloud Logging without changing application code. Which Ops Agent capability supports this?

   1. A. Apply JSON or regular-expression parsing to extract structured fields.
   2. B. Forward each original text line unchanged as a single text payload.
   3. C. Filter lines by severity while leaving each retained line's text unchanged.
   4. D. Rename the field containing the entire line without extracting its contents.

   Answer: A

   Explanation: The Ops Agent supports "Parse text logs into structured logs: JSON-based and regular-expression-based parsing." Parsing extracts fields from the text. Forwarding, filtering whole lines, and renaming a whole-line field do not extract that internal structure.

   Reference: Ops Agent overview — Logging features — Flexible processing

10. 10For a repeatedly observed function, wall-clock time is substantially greater than CPU time. What performance behavior does this difference indicate?

    1. A. Elapsed function time includes substantial waiting in addition to CPU execution.
    2. B. The CPU executes the function's instructions throughout its elapsed wall time.
    3. C. Wall-clock measurements exclude the function's I/O and synchronization waits.
    4. D. CPU-time measurements include time the function spends waiting for a lock.

    Answer: A

    Explanation: Google states, "If the wall-clock time is longer than the CPU time, then that indicates the code spends time waiting." Wall-clock time includes waiting; CPU time measures execution. The other interpretations incorrectly make CPU execution cover waiting or exclude waits from elapsed time.

    Reference: Profiling concepts — Time measurements