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Objective 3.2

PCDE

Managing service lifecycle

Objective 3.2 sits in Applying site reliability engineering practices, which carries 18% of the Cloud DevOps Engineer exam. The questions below are original, written from the official objective title above, and each explanation cites the Google Cloud page it rests on.

Objective title verbatim from the official objectives. Google Cloud exam page ↗

A worked example

Shown solved, with the whole explanation open: this is what every question here carries.

3-2Applying site reliability engineering practices

A team cannot decide whether a published target is an SLO or an SLA. Which question settles it?

Is the target published to users outside the teamObjectives are routinely published to users, and doing so is recommended for setting expectations.
Is the indicator collected on the server or clientWhere a measurement is taken shapes the indicator and says nothing about the commitment.
Is the target expressed as a range or a boundBoth a single bound and a range are legitimate shapes for an objective.
Is there an explicit consequence for missing itCorrect · your answerCorrect: the penalty clause is the dividing line.

Correct.

Concept

A promise with nothing riding on it is a goal; a promise carrying a penalty is a contract. The distinction is not about wording or audience, it is about what happens when the number is missed.

Why D

Ask what follows if the number is not met. Where there is no stated penalty or rebate, the thing being discussed is an objective; where a consequence is written down, it is an agreement.

Source

An easy way to tell the difference between an SLO and an SLA is to ask "what happens if the SLOs aren’t met?": if there is no explicit consequence, then you are almost certainly looking at an SLO.

Google SRE Book: Service Level Objectives, checked August 2026
#sre#slo#sla

Now you: objective 3.2 questions

No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.

Sample question 1 of 3

3-2Applying site reliability engineering practices

An engineer is asked to name a service level indicator for a request-serving API. Which of these qualifies?

Sample question 2 of 3

3-2Applying site reliability engineering practices

A team wants to set an objective on incoming queries per second. What is the objection to doing that?

Sample question 3 of 3

3-2Applying site reliability engineering practices

A team operating a storage system asks which third indicator to add beside latency and availability. Which one is named?

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Read the sources

These are the official pages the questions above cite. Reading them is studying the objective from the primary source, which is what the explanations point you toward anyway.

More objectives in Applying site reliability engineering practices