GCP Financial Management & Budgeting 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A GCP project's billing account is suspended. What is the most likely immediate effect on running resources?
- All running VMs are immediately terminated
- Resources continue running for 30 days before termination
- Resources are stopped but data is preserved temporarily (Correct answer)
- The project is deleted immediately
Correct answer: Resources are stopped but data is preserved temporarily
When a billing account is suspended, GCP stops running resources but preserves data for a grace period to allow payment resolution.
Question 2: Which GCP feature allows you to receive alerts when your spending is projected to exceed a certain threshold before the period ends?
- Billing export to BigQuery
- Budget forecasted spend alerts (Correct answer)
- Cost breakdown reports
- Committed use discount notifications
Correct answer: Budget forecasted spend alerts
Budget forecasted spend alerts notify you when GCP's spending projection for the period is expected to exceed your defined threshold.
Question 3: You want to analyze GCP spending at the resource tag level across multiple projects. What is the best approach?
- Use Cloud Monitoring dashboards
- Export billing data to BigQuery and query by labels (Correct answer)
- Use the Billing console spending breakdown
- Create separate billing accounts per tag
Correct answer: Export billing data to BigQuery and query by labels
Exporting billing data to BigQuery allows querying cost data by resource labels, enabling granular cross-project analysis.
Question 4: A company uses 50 n2-standard-4 VMs continuously for a year. Which pricing model would reduce costs the most compared to on-demand pricing?
- Sustained use discounts applied automatically
- 1-year committed use discounts
- 3-year committed use discounts (Correct answer)
- Preemptible VM instances
Correct answer: 3-year committed use discounts
3-year committed use discounts offer up to 70% off on-demand pricing, the highest discount tier for predictable long-term workloads.
Question 5: Which tool in GCP helps estimate the cost of a proposed architecture before it is deployed?
- Cloud Billing dashboard
- GCP Pricing Calculator (Correct answer)
- Cost Management Advisor
- Cloud Asset Inventory
Correct answer: GCP Pricing Calculator
The GCP Pricing Calculator lets you configure resources and estimate monthly costs before deploying any infrastructure.
Question 6: Your team accidentally left a large Persistent Disk snapshot unneeded for 6 months. Which cost management practice would have prevented this?
- Using committed use discounts on storage
- Implementing lifecycle policies and regular cost reviews (Correct answer)
- Migrating to Cloud Spanner instead
- Enabling sustained use discounts
Correct answer: Implementing lifecycle policies and regular cost reviews
Regular cost reviews and automated lifecycle policies help identify and clean up unused resources like orphaned snapshots.
Question 7: A startup wants to keep GCP costs unpredictable only if usage spikes. Which budget alert configuration is most appropriate?
- Alert at 50%, 90%, and 100% of a fixed monthly budget (Correct answer)
- Alert only when the forecasted spend exceeds 150% of budget
- Alert at 100% and disable all services automatically
- Set no alerts and review monthly invoices
Correct answer: Alert at 50%, 90%, and 100% of a fixed monthly budget
Setting alerts at 50%, 90%, and 100% provides early warning at multiple stages so the team can respond before overspending significantly.
GCP Financial Management & Budgeting 2
A GCP project's billing account is suspended.
What is the most likely immediate effect on running resources?