GCP-PAA practice questions
Google · GCP-PAA · 200 questions
Original practice questions for the Google Cloud Certified Professional Agentic Architect (GCP-PAA) exam, covering building agents using low-code tools, using coding agents for application development, developing custom agents, evaluating and deploying agentic workflows, and securing and governing agentic workflows — framed in civic and municipal scenarios such as city AI pilots, public-health records, permitting chatbots, 311 assistants, courts / clerk workflows, and transit / utilities operations.
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
About the GCP-PAA exam
- Exam fee
- $120 USD
- Time allowed
- 3 hours
- Questions
- 80
- Languages
- English
- Format
- Two required parts: a proctored multiple-choice exam (~80 items, 3 hours, delivered by Pearson, online-proctored or onsite-proctored) assessing conceptual knowledge, system design choices, and architectural standards; plus hands-on labs (less than 5 hours, delivered in Google Skills) validating hands-on execution and coding ability in an active cloud environment. Both parts must be passed to earn the certification.
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Exam details published by the vendor, checked 13 September 2026. Vendors change fees and formats without notice — confirm on the vendor's own page before you book.
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Building agents using low-code tools · 26 questions
- A 311 team is building a pothole-reporting agent in Gemini Enterprise Agent Designer with separate steps for location capture, category selection, and photo upload. Which construct governs advancing the citizen from one collection step to the next once that step's required information is captured?
- A building-permits chatbot in Gemini Enterprise goes quiet when a resident doesn't respond for 30 seconds mid-conversation. Which mechanism should the team configure so the agent escalates to a human permit clerk instead of letting the session hang?
- A county clerk's marriage-license assistant needs to reason through a multi-step document checklist before telling the applicant what's missing. Which in-console prompt-template technique should the team add to the system instructions to guide this step-by-step reasoning?
- A courthouse self-help kiosk agent must never offer legal advice. After drafting a system instruction constraining tone and scope, the team wants to further anchor the boundary with concrete acceptable vs unacceptable sample answers. Which in-console technique should they add?
- A transit-authority rider agent must branch into separate pages for "check schedule," "dispute fare," and "file complaint," each returning to a main menu once the sub-task finishes. What drives this page-to-page navigation in the state-based low-code workflow?
- A municipal water utility wants a single agent to handle both "report an outage" and "ask about my bill" for residents. Which approach best applies state-based low-code design to this two-purpose agent?
- A housing authority's caseworker-intake screening involves branching eligibility rules with several conditional calculations, and the number of conditions keeps growing as new housing programs are added. What should the architect conclude about the right tool for this workflow?
- A school-district registration assistant is restricted to public enrollment information and must decline any request touching individual student records. Which mechanism, configured in CX Agent Studio, enforces this scope boundary on the agent's behavior?
- During a severe-weather event, an emergency-management notification agent keeps failing to recognize resident queries. Which change to the no-match event handler prevents the caller from looping through repeated clarification prompts and instead routes them to a live dispatcher line?
- A county IT help desk team is deciding between Gemini Enterprise Agent Designer and CX Agent Studio for an internal ticket-routing agent, and the team already has conversational-flow diagrams built from a prior project. Which factor should tip the decision toward CX Agent Studio?
- A parks-and-recreation class-registration agent keeps mismatching similarly named classes when residents type informal phrasing. What should the team add to the in-console prompt template to resolve this recurring ambiguity?
- A 311 request-status page needs to re-ask the citizen for a missing case number rather than firing the no-match event handler every time that required slot is empty. What should the team configure instead?
- A library card-renewal chatbot works fine in Agent Designer until the team wants it to also reconcile fines across three separate backend systems in real time. What should the architect conclude?
- A public-health department wants its Gemini Enterprise agent to query a restricted immunization-records data source without exposing the underlying database directly to citizens. How should the team configure this connection?
- A city's open-data portal team wants residents to ask natural-language questions over its published datasets. What should the team configure to index that data for retrieval?
- A permitting office has thousands of scanned PDF applications that need to be ingested as unstructured content so the agent can answer questions about permit status and requirements. What should the team configure?
- A county clerk's office wants recorded video of public court proceedings searchable by citizens through the agent. What must happen to the video content before it can be indexed for retrieval?
- A 311 assistant needs to pull live work-order status from the public-works ticketing system. What should the architect choose to connect this proprietary source securely instead of hardcoding sample data into the agent?
- A housing authority wants caseworker phone-call recordings transcribed and indexed so the agent can answer staff FAQs about common casework scenarios. What should the team configure?
- A transit agency wants its agent to answer questions using route maps and schedule images that only exist as scanned graphics, not structured text. What should the team configure to bring this content into the agent's knowledge?
- A water utility's billing agent must query a proprietary customer-account database through Gemini Enterprise, and the data's volume and structure fit comfortably within the platform's built-in connector capabilities. What should the architect choose?
- A school district's IT team has boxes of scanned paper enrollment forms that need to be processed into the agent's data source so registration staff can query prior submissions. What should they configure?
- An emergency-management office wants an internal agent trained on its disaster-response training videos so staff can quickly retrieve procedural answers during an incident. What should the team configure?
- A library's summer-reading-program agent works well with Agent Search over its program catalog, but the team expects data variety and volume to keep growing. At what point should the architect conclude the low-code ingestion path is no longer sufficient?
- A county records-management system holds both public deed records and restricted probate files. How should the clerk's office configure the data connection so the agent only surfaces the public subset to residents?
- A municipal open-data portal wants audio recordings of past town-hall meetings made searchable by topic through its citizen-facing Gemini Enterprise agent. The archive team has hundreds of hours of raw audio files sitting in Cloud Storage. What should the team do so the agent can retrieve and reference specific topics from those recordings?
Using coding agents for application development · 34 questions
- A county permitting department's coding agent needs to query a legacy permitting database through a newly registered MCP server. The database also stores applicant Social Security numbers and internal fee-waiver notes unrelated to the coding agent's task. How should the architect configure the MCP server so the coding agent can do its job?
- A transit authority's engineering lead is choosing between Antigravity and Claude Code on Google Cloud for a routine bug fix in an existing route-scheduling service running inside the authority's Google Cloud environment. The team already has established coding-agent workflows and just needs the fix implemented and reviewed like any other change. Which factor should most influence the choice between the two tools?
- A 311 resident-service assistant's coding agent is being scoped for a ticket-triage feature: it needs to read and edit the triage-routing module's source files. The module has no deployment step of its own and does not call external services. How should the team configure the agent's tool access for this work?
- A city IT team must choose a sandbox environment for a coding agent that will refactor a sensitive court case-management module. The refactor touches records with strict confidentiality requirements, needs strong workload isolation from other tenants, and the team wants fine-grained control over the runtime's network policy and resource boundaries. Which sandbox choice best matches these requirements?
- A county clerk's office asks its coding agent to restructure a decade-old case filing module so the internal code is cleaner and easier to maintain, without changing anything about what the module does from a caller's perspective, ahead of a larger modernization effort. How should the architect classify this task, and what should the agent's output preserve?
- A transit-ops nightly batch job that recalculates route delays is running too slowly, and the engineering team assigns a coding agent to profile and optimize its execution runtime. Before accepting the agent's proposed change as the fix, what should the team require as justification?
- A permitting chatbot's application layer is found to be vulnerable to injection attacks, and the team tasks a coding agent with patching the vulnerable input-handling code. What should happen after the coding agent produces its patch, before the fix is deployed to the live permitting chatbot?
- A public-health records team is configuring Model Context Protocol servers for its coding agent and needs the agent to read schema definitions for development work without ever having a path to protected health data rows. Which approach best meets this requirement?
- A county IT shared-services team runs coding agents for multiple departments on a shared GKE cluster and wants a compromised agent in one department's workload to be unable to reach another department's code or secrets. Which design best achieves this isolation?
- A municipal open-data team keeps typing the same instructions into its coding agent's prompt every time it asks the agent to validate incoming CSV uploads against a schema. What is the better long-term approach?
- A housing authority's casework application team connects its coding agent to source control through an MCP-based integration and must decide what repository permissions to grant the agent's identity. Which approach best follows the principle of least privilege?
- During a security review, an architect finds that a school-district coding agent assigned only to a ticketing-system integration task was granted broad file-system access across the department's shared drives. How should the architect characterize this finding?
- A public library's catalog system is running slow lookups, and the team tasks its coding agent with identifying inefficient database queries contributing to the slowdown. Which framing best matches the scope of the task assigned to the agent?
- An emergency-management agency runs its coding agent only inside an Antigravity-managed sandbox during development so that generated code cannot reach production network resources. What is the primary security benefit this sandboxing provides?
- A water-utility billing team is starting an early-stage refactor and must decide whether its coding agent should have write access to the billing repository or be limited to read-only suggestions. Which consideration should most influence that decision?
- A county IT architect is deciding where a short-lived, non-interactive code-generation task should run: as an ephemeral GKE job that spins up only for the task, or as a persistent Cloud Workstations session kept available for interactive debugging. Which environment best fits a task that finishes quickly and needs no human at the keyboard while it runs?
- A transit authority discovers its coding agent occasionally calls a deprecated internal API that should have been removed from its available tool list months earlier. What does this reveal about how the authority should treat its coding agent's tool and MCP server configuration going forward?
- A permitting department wants every coding-agent run in Antigravity to apply the same code-review standard, covering naming conventions and error-handling patterns, without re-explaining the standard in every session. Which Antigravity customization primitive best packages this reusable review standard so the agent can invoke it whenever a matching review task comes up?
- A school-district IT team wants its Antigravity coding agent to open and update tickets in its existing helpdesk system as part of its normal workflow. Which mechanism should the team build to give the agent this third-party system integration?
- A county clerk's office has repository-specific formatting and commit-message conventions that every coding-agent contribution must follow. Which Antigravity mechanism should the team use to encode these persistent repository conventions so the agent applies them automatically?
- A transit authority wants no code from its coding agent to reach the repository unless the automated test suite passes, and needs an enforcement point that runs automatically around the commit step. Which Antigravity mechanism should the team configure to enforce this gate?
- A city's application security work needs a specialized reviewer distinct from the main coding agent that handles feature development. Which approach best fits delegating this specialized security review responsibility within Antigravity?
- A county government's IT department runs coding agents across dozens of department repositories, including parks, transit, and water, and needs to manage them consistently at scale rather than configuring each one independently. Which tool should the department adopt to build, scale, and govern its deployed coding agents across all these repositories?
- An emergency-management agency's coding agent proposes a change to dispatch-routing logic, and policy requires a human approver to review and explicitly authorize the change before it proceeds. Which approach correctly applies Agents CLI governance controls to require this human approval?
- A 311 platform's operations team notices that its Agents CLI-managed coding-agent deployment is running well over its monthly budget, even though the agent keeps completing its assigned tasks correctly. What should the team do with Agents CLI to bring cost back in line without reducing what the agent is able to accomplish?
- A housing authority's engineering team is preparing a code change to casework-eligibility logic that touches residents' sensitive personal data. Which Agents CLI operating mode should they select for this specific change?
- A municipal monorepo spans parks, transit, and water-utility code, each with its own conventions and domain knowledge. The platform team wants a single coding-agent deployment in Antigravity to handle work across all three departments efficiently. What structure best fits this?
- A water-utility repository nearly had a coding agent commit a hardcoded credential. The platform team wants to automatically stop this specific class of mistake before it reaches the repository, without slowing down every other type of commit. What should they configure?
- A court system wants its coding agent to query case-record data through a court-records integration, but only with a narrow set of read operations rather than the integration's full API surface. What configuration achieves this?
- A public-health department requires every agent-authored pull request to pass a governance review step before it can be merged into the production codebase. How should this be set up using Agents CLI?
- A city engineering team is drafting a rules file for its coding agent to distinguish which categories of issues it may fix automatically versus which must always be flagged for human review. How should the rules be structured?
- A county has built a validated data-masking skill for one department's coding agent and wants other departments' agents to reuse it safely instead of each team re-authoring the same capability. What should they use?
- A county government is rolling out Antigravity coding agents across every department and wants a single, centrally managed policy layer controlling what all of them are permitted to do. Where should this policy be configured?
- A city IT director wants an ongoing way to track which coding agents across departments are underperforming — slow, error-prone, or over-permissioned — so remediation can be prioritized before a full security review takes place. What best fits this need?
Developing custom agents · 66 questions
- A city 311 assistant needs to classify routine resident intents, like pothole reports versus noise complaints, at low latency and low cost. The team is weighing a self-hosted small language model against a larger proprietary LLM for this specific classification task. Which choice best fits the requirement?
- A county clerk's records agent handles sealed court filings and must satisfy a data-residency requirement that keeps this data within infrastructure the county directly controls. The team is deciding between a SaaS Gemini LLM call and a self-hosted open-source model. Which factor should drive the decision?
- A water utility's field-ops triage agent routes routine work-order requests through a smaller open-source model while reserving a large proprietary Gemini model for complex incident narratives. What principle does this architecture reflect?
- A housing authority builds an ADK-based eligibility agent that composes multiple typed tools, an income calculator and a document checker, rather than relying on a single monolithic prompt to handle the whole eligibility decision. What does this reflect about custom agent development with ADK?
- A transit agency's trip-planning agent, built with ADK, defines a typed schema for a fare-lookup function along with a callback that validates the tool's output before it's returned to the rider. What does this design correctly reflect about ADK tool integration?
- A permitting chatbot team must choose between a proprietary Gemini model accessed via Model Garden and an open-source model, given a policy that no applicant data may leave the agency's VPC. Which choice satisfies the constraint?
- An emergency-management alert agent uses a small on-device model for rapid triage during a network outage and a larger cloud-hosted LLM for detailed after-action narrative summaries once connectivity returns. What principle explains why this design is appropriate?
- A school-district IT helpdesk agent needs to preserve multi-turn context across a single ticket conversation. Instead of re-sending the full conversation history with every turn, the team configures managed sessions. What are managed sessions actually providing here?
- A public-health records assistant needs to recall a resident's prior inquiries across separate visits without improperly persisting protected health information. What memory configuration approach fits this requirement?
- A 311 assistant team is debating whether to store active conversation and session state in Firestore or in Cloud SQL. Given that this data is document-like, evolves per conversation, and doesn't need complex relational joins, which choice fits better?
- A library program assistant uses Memorystore for Redis as a fast short-term session cache while relying on Firestore for durable long-term user memory. What does this combination reflect about the two services?
- A parks-and-recreation reservation agent uses Agent Platform Memory Bank to remember a resident's favorite park and accessibility needs across unrelated future sessions, weeks apart. What does Memory Bank provide here that a session's transient state does not?
- A county IT team configures an ADK agent's compliance step to run in human mode via Agents CLI, requiring a staff member to approve a sensitive action before it executes, while routine steps elsewhere in the same workflow continue running in autonomous agent mode. What justifies this split?
- A housing authority adds a document-verification capability to its casework agent by installing an Agents CLI plugin, rather than rewriting the agent's core logic to add the capability directly. What does this reflect about how Agents CLI plugins work?
- A courts and clerk agent computes filing deadlines and must switch from autonomous agent mode to human mode via Agents CLI whenever a deadline calculation affects a party's legal rights, while continuing to run routine, non-binding date calculations autonomously. What threshold determines when the switch to human mode is required?
- A transit agency plans to host an agentic system on GKE integrated with sensitive SCADA controls for rail signaling, and infrastructure policy requires that no scenario training or inference data leave agency-owned infrastructure. Which consideration most directly narrows which language models the architect can even evaluate for this agent?
- A municipal open-data portal's agent sends simple metadata lookups, like the update frequency of the parking-sensor dataset, to a lightweight model, while complex cross-dataset analytical questions get routed to a larger Gemini model. What architectural pattern does this design represent?
- An emergency-management agency's incident-response agent must keep functioning during a regional internet or cloud-provider outage that could sever access to an external SaaS model API. The architect chooses a self-hosted open-source model running on agency-controlled infrastructure instead. What tradeoff does this decision primarily accept?
- A school district builds a tutoring agent by writing code with the Agent Development Kit (ADK), explicitly defining its system instruction and the exact set of tools it may call. A colleague asks why this wasn't configured instead in a low-code console like Gemini Enterprise's Agent Designer. What distinguishes the ADK approach for this use case?
- A city permitting agent walks an applicant through a multi-step application across several browser sessions. Weeks later, an abandoned application unexpectedly resumes with stale form data because the agent's session was left open indefinitely. What should the architect have configured to prevent this?
- A water utility's billing agent stores structured customer account and billing records in Cloud SQL, while keeping short-lived conversational turn context in Memorystore for Redis during an active session. What principle does this split reflect?
- A county procurement agent uses a large proprietary LLM to reason about high-stakes vendor-compliance determinations, but routes routine vendor FAQ questions to a smaller, cheaper model. What is the underlying selection principle?
- A permitting chatbot's RAG pipeline must index a large municipal zoning-code corpus organized into numbered sections and subsections with cross-references. Which embedding and chunking approach best fits this source material?
- A courts/clerk agent's retrieval step returns the top twenty case-law snippets by vector similarity, then a reranking model reorders those twenty before the top few are passed to the generation step. When does adding this reranking stage most clearly improve grounding compared to using the initial vector similarity ranking alone?
- A public-health records assistant's retrieval step is returning loosely-related patient records that lead the model to generate conclusions not actually supported by the source data. What configuration change most directly addresses this failure?
- A housing authority is weighing standing up and operating its own Vector Search index for case-file embeddings against using the managed Agent Retrieval service. Which factor should most influence that decision?
- A 311 resident-service assistant needs to ground its answers in a municipal knowledge base of ordinances, service schedules, and FAQ articles. The team chooses Agent Search, formerly Vertex AI Search, over building a custom Vector Search retrieval pipeline from scratch. When is this the sounder choice?
- A transit agency's trip-planning agent needs to read public schedule data, but the same Google Cloud project also stores internal HR records for agency employees. How should the architect scope the agent's Agent Identity to prevent the trip-planning agent from ever touching HR data?
- A water utility agent has two tools: one that creates work orders with write access, and one that looks up billing history and is strictly read-only, both governed by Agent Identity. What does scoping these two tools to different permission levels within the same agent accomplish?
- County IT builds a reusable address-validation capability and publishes it to Agent Registry so that agents built by the parks department, the permitting office, and the water utility can each discover and call it. What problem does this primarily solve?
- A school district's enrollment agent needs to query a Cloud SQL database of student records. The architect connects the agent to the database through the Google Cloud MCP Server rather than writing bespoke connection code inside the agent. What does this primarily provide?
- An emergency-management agency wants its incident-response agent to trigger alerts on a legacy siren and notification system that predates any modern API standard. No prebuilt MCP server or existing Google Cloud integration covers this system. When does building a custom MCP server for it make sense?
- A parks-and-recreation department's booking agent needs to check availability and reserve facilities through a third-party SaaS reservation platform that publishes a remote MCP server. Why would the department connect through that vendor-hosted remote MCP server rather than integrating directly against the platform's own API?
- A public library system has agents supporting catalog search, interlibrary loan requests, and patron account lookups, each built by a different branch's development team. The library's platform team catalogs a shared "check patron eligibility" skill in Skill Registry for all three agents to use. What does this cataloging step accomplish?
- A permitting agent's retrieval quality degrades sharply after a routine update: queries that previously returned highly relevant zoning-code passages now return near-random results, even though the documents themselves weren't changed. What most likely explains this?
- A housing authority's case-management system already has a prebuilt MCP Server that covers case creation, status updates, and document attachment. The architect chooses to connect the agent through that prebuilt MCP Server rather than building a custom API integration against the case-management system directly. When is this the sounder choice?
- A courts research agent needs to consult sealed case records as context when answering authorized staff questions, but must never modify those records. The architect scopes Agent Identity to grant read access to the sealed-records store and no write access at all. What does this asymmetric boundary accomplish?
- A 311 resident-service assistant retrieves ordinance passages by semantic similarity, but an outdated ordinance sometimes outranks a newer one that says essentially the same thing in fresher wording. The team adds a reranking step that weights recency alongside similarity. What does this reranking step accomplish?
- A transit agency is indexing its GTFS-derived service documentation for a rider-facing agent and must choose a chunk size for the retrieval corpus. What tradeoff does that chunk-size decision primarily involve?
- A county procurement office wants its vendor-sourcing agent to ground responses in vendor records stored in BigQuery, but the queries require custom filtering, joins, and business logic specific to the county's procurement rules. The team builds a custom integration layer between the agent and BigQuery rather than using a generic prebuilt connector. When does this custom layer make sense?
- A public-health department's clinical-coding agent needs similarity scoring tuned to structured diagnostic codes rather than generic document relevance. Which retrieval approach should the architecture team choose?
- A school district's engineering team needs a tool capability that another department already built and published. What should they do before writing any new code?
- A water utility exposes SCADA telemetry through an MCP server that must reject write commands from any agent. How should the team enforce this boundary?
- A housing authority's eligibility-policy retrieval pipeline must choose between a general-purpose embedding model and one tuned to housing-policy language. What consideration should drive the decision?
- A permitting department chains three agents so intake hands off to zoning-review, which hands off to approval, with each stage depending on the previous stage's output. Which orchestration pattern fits this design?
- An emergency-management team runs weather, traffic, and shelter-capacity agents whose outputs don't depend on each other, then aggregates the three results into one recommendation. Which orchestration pattern best fits this design?
- A 311 assistant must route a resident's request differently depending on whether it's a pothole report, a noise complaint, or a billing issue, with different follow-up steps for each path. Which orchestration pattern fits this requirement?
- A courts/clerk system's filing agent must hand off a case to a scheduling agent that belongs to a different team's separate Agent Runtime deployment. Which protocol is designed for this agent-to-agent handoff across separately owned deployments?
- A transit agency's trip-planning agent needs to call a shared fare-calculation tool hosted by another department. Which protocol fits this agent-to-tool access?
- A housing authority's triage agent needs to delegate to an eligibility-verification agent that it has no advance knowledge of at build time. How should it locate and delegate to that agent at runtime?
- A water utility's multiagent workflow needs one agent to be the only one that can issue work orders, while every other agent in the workflow may only read sensor data. What is the right way to enforce this difference?
- A school district's policy requires that a tutoring agent may invoke a grading agent only when the calling identity belongs to an authorized teacher-agent, not just any agent that knows the grading agent's capability. What does this scenario illustrate?
- A county IT team is deciding, for a specific integration, whether MCP or A2A is the correct protocol to use. What question should settle the choice?
- A permitting team runs a zoning check and a fire-safety check in parallel when they're independent, but runs them sequentially when the fire-safety check needs the zoning outcome as an input. What principle explains why the team switches patterns between cases?
- A public-health intake workflow needs to loop back to a clarification agent whenever the classification agent's confidence score is low, rather than proceeding with an uncertain result. Which orchestration pattern naturally supports this loop-back behavior?
- An emergency-management agent policy blocks a dispatch-recommendation agent from autonomously triggering an evacuation, requiring it instead to escalate the decision to a human-supervisor agent. What does this design choice reflect?
- A library/parks reservation agent hands off a booking to a separately hosted payment agent via A2A, and the requester's identity must carry through to the payment step. What must the handoff preserve for this to work correctly?
- A transit agency hosts a delay-predictor agent and a rider-assistant agent on Agent Runtime and coordinates them via A2A into one unified rider-facing chat experience. What does this design achieve?
- A housing authority's triage agent routes cases to specialized caseworker agents by category using a graph workflow, rather than having one generalist agent handle every case type itself. When does this specialization-plus-routing approach outperform a single generalist agent?
- A courts orchestrator agent selects the correct filing-type sub-agent by reading capability metadata published in Agent Registry, rather than the development team hardcoding a fixed lookup table of sub-agents. What benefit does this approach provide?
- A county procurement workflow enforces an audit trail by having each agent log its output before handing off to the next stage in a sequential chain. What does this design choice add to the workflow?
- A 311 assistant team is weighing a parallel-agent fan-out against a single agent performing sequential lookups for the same resident request. What tradeoff should drive their decision?
- A water utility requires an agent policy step that validates a calling agent's identity before granting cross-department sensor access over A2A. Where must that validation apply for the design to be effective?
- A school district's orchestrator agent discovers a newly published translation agent via Agent Registry and starts delegating to it without any redeployment of the orchestrator. What made this possible?
- An emergency-management graph workflow includes a retry/error branch that triggers when a downstream shelter-capacity agent times out. What does adding this explicit branch accomplish?
- A transit agency's rider-complaint workflow calls a fare API through a tool-access protocol for routine refund lookups, but when a complaint turns into a multi-department dispute it hands the case off to a specialized escalation agent using a different protocol built for agent-to-agent coordination. Which pairing correctly matches each protocol to its purpose in this workflow?
Evaluating and deploying agentic workflows · 44 questions
- A county permitting-office team is assembling a golden dataset for their permit-application chatbot. Most prompts are straightforward status-check questions, but the team adds a smaller set of deliberately ambiguous prompts asking about multiple permit types at once. What makes those ambiguous multi-permit prompts a valuable addition to the golden dataset rather than a redundant variation on the status-check prompts?
- A city 311 team drafts prompts for their golden test set that intentionally include multi-intent resident requests, such as reporting a pothole while also asking about the trash pickup schedule in the same message. What does including these multi-intent prompts stress-test that single-intent prompts cannot?
- A transit authority runs a continuous evaluation pipeline after every release of its trip-planning agent. For each golden scenario, the pipeline checks whether the agent's tool calls, such as fetching the schedule and computing a transfer, match the success criteria defined for that scenario. What is this pipeline verifying that a check of only the agent's final answer text would miss?
- A county IT architect is scoring a courts-clerk agent's document-retrieval accuracy and is choosing among ADK's evaluation tooling (evalset), the Agent Platform Gen AI evaluation service, and a custom autorater. The retrieval logic is unusually domain-specific, hinging on court-filing conventions that generic quality scorers don't recognize. Which choice best fits this requirement?
- A housing authority builds a custom autorater to judge whether an eligibility-screening agent's explanations are policy-compliant, after finding that a generic quality scorer kept rating clearly non-compliant explanations as high quality. What justifies choosing a custom autorater over the generic scorer here?
- A public-health records team is deciding how to evaluate their records-lookup agent. One option scores only the final response returned to the requester; another inspects the full reasoning trajectory, including which tools the agent called and in what order. When is trajectory evaluation the more appropriate choice over final-response-only scoring?
- An open-data portal team evaluates a RAG-backed civic-data assistant against a golden dataset using ADK, scoring retrieved document relevance and generated-answer accuracy as two separate metrics rather than a single combined score. Why does scoring these two dimensions separately give the team a clearer picture than one blended score?
- A water-utility ops team runs their leak-report triage agent's golden dataset through ADK evaluation tooling before every merge, comparing the new scores against a stored baseline from the last known-good build. What does comparing against a stored baseline give the team that a one-off evaluation run does not?
- Before promoting a new build of a tutoring-support agent, a school-district IT team has staff review only the transcripts the pipeline flags as low-confidence, approving or correcting those before rollout rather than reading every transcript. What is the advantage of targeting review at low-confidence transcripts instead of reviewing the full transcript set?
- A clerk's office evaluates its document-classification agent with two distinct metrics: precision and recall for the retrieval step, and task-completion rate for the full end-to-end trajectory. Why does matching each metric to its own pipeline stage matter here rather than reporting one combined completion rate for everything?
- After tightening the system instructions on a permitting chatbot, a city team reruns the full golden-dataset evaluation suite rather than spot-checking a handful of prompts most related to the change. What risk does the full rerun cover that spot-checking the related prompts would not?
- A transit agency compares two candidate versions of its trip-planning agent side by side on the same golden dataset before deciding which to promote to production. What does this comparative evaluation give the team that evaluating each candidate against its own separate baseline would not reliably give?
- A courts-clerk scheduling agent handles multi-turn conversations with self-represented litigants. Its evaluation suite scores not just each turn's individual accuracy but also whether the agent maintains correct case context across the whole conversation. What failure would per-turn accuracy scoring alone miss that this added check catches?
- An emergency-management agent's evaluation suite checks whether it invokes the correct alerting API with correctly formatted parameters, as a step separate from scoring whether its natural-language summary reads well. Why does the team keep these two checks separate rather than folding tool-invocation correctness into the general quality score?
- A housing authority runs its eligibility-screening agent's evaluation suite across demographic subgroups of applicants before deployment, rather than checking only an aggregate accuracy score across all applicants combined. What can subgroup evaluation surface that an aggregate score alone would hide?
- A county IT team wires their ADK agent's golden-dataset evaluation into the CI pipeline so that every code change automatically triggers a full evaluation run, and a merge is blocked if scores drop below a set threshold. What problem does wiring evaluation into CI solve that running the same evaluation manually, only when someone remembers to, does not?
- A library-programs assistant's evaluation scores decline gradually over several months even though no code changed. Investigating, the team suspects the golden dataset itself has gone stale relative to how resident questions have shifted. What does this scenario illustrate about golden datasets that a one-time creation approach misses?
- A 311 assistant's golden dataset deliberately includes out-of-scope resident requests, such as asking the agent to draft a legal complaint, to verify it declines gracefully instead of attempting the task. What does this design choice specifically test that a dataset made only of in-scope requests could not?
- A public-health records RAG agent's evaluation checks whether its cited source passages actually support the generated answer, rather than only whether the final answer text reads as plausible. What distinct problem does grounding evaluation catch that plausibility alone would miss?
- A county evaluation team debates whether their 40-prompt golden dataset is large enough to draw a reliable conclusion before promoting a new permitting-agent version. What consideration should weigh most heavily on whether 40 prompts is enough for this go/no-go decision?
- During development of a transit trip-planning agent meant for a real-time kiosk, the team runs evaluations that jointly track response latency alongside quality scores, since a faster but slightly less accurate model might still be preferred for that use case. Why does the team evaluate latency and quality together rather than optimizing quality alone and treating latency as a separate concern?
- A school-district team periodically compares their custom autorater's scores against a sample independently rated by human staff, to confirm the autorater hasn't drifted from human judgment. What risk does this periodic calibration step address that building the autorater once and trusting it indefinitely would not?
- A city architect is choosing a deployment runtime for a resident-facing 311 chatbot. One team wants managed session state and minimal operational overhead; another wants fine-grained control over the container environment. Which pairing of runtime to requirement fits best?
- A permitting office sees sharp seasonal traffic spikes during building season and needs its agent deployment to scale cost-effectively during quiet months without paying for idle capacity year-round. Which deployment consideration should drive this decision?
- A courts-clerk agent that has reliably answered filing-status questions for months starts giving subtly outdated procedural guidance, even though no code or prompt changes were deployed to it. What is the most likely explanation, and how should the team confirm it?
- A transit agency's trip-planning agent starts responding noticeably slower, and trace spans show most of the added time sits inside a downstream schedule-lookup tool call rather than the model's reasoning step. Where should the team focus its optimization effort?
- A 311 resident-service assistant occasionally gets stuck repeatedly calling the same lookup tool with nearly identical arguments and never produces a final answer for the resident. What production issue is occurring, and what should the team check first?
- A water-utility agent's outage-reporting workflow fails for every resident after a downstream permit-status API it depends on goes offline, rather than only failing the specific requests that call that API. How should the on-call team classify this incident?
- A county IT team wants to instrument their permitting agent so that, when a resident files a complaint about a specific answer, engineers can reconstruct exactly which reasoning steps and tool calls happened for that request. Which Google Cloud Observability capability should they configure for this?
- A transit kiosk agent's engineers want to pinpoint exactly which stage of a multi-step itinerary-building workflow is contributing the most latency before they decide where to optimize. Which capability should they use?
- A public-health records assistant's production monitoring dashboard flags a rising rate of responses that cite records not present in the underlying data source. What production issue does this pattern indicate, and how does it differ from a latency or cost concern?
- A permitting office's agent traffic triples during the spring building-permit rush, and the team wants the deployment to scale to meet demand automatically rather than requiring someone to provision capacity by hand. Which deployment consideration addresses this need?
- Before fully switching resident traffic over to a new version of the 311 assistant, a city team routes a small percentage of live requests to the new version and compares its outcomes against the current production version before expanding further. What deployment strategy is this?
- A school-district agent's newest release starts producing incorrect attendance-policy answers within hours of launch, and the on-call engineer needs to restore correct behavior for families as quickly as possible. What is the most direct deployment action to take?
- A transit authority stands up a full parallel production environment running its new agent version, validates it there, and then cuts resident-facing traffic over to it all at once rather than upgrading the live environment in place. What deployment approach is this?
- A county IT budget owner reviews per-request token consumption alongside compute spend across a fleet of civic agents to determine where production cost is concentrated. What does examining both dimensions together accomplish that either one alone would miss?
- A courts-clerk team needs its coding-agent-built document-review workflow to run inside a tightly controlled sandbox with custom networking rules that a fully managed runtime doesn't expose configuration for. What consideration should drive their deployment runtime choice here?
- A water-utility team is deciding between Cloud Run and Agent Runtime for two different workloads: a stateless outage-lookup agent that answers each request independently, and a stateful multi-turn casework agent for housing-authority intake that must track context across a resident's conversation. How should the workload characteristics guide the choice?
- A city sets alerting thresholds on its Observability dashboards so that a sustained rise in tool-call error rate or response latency for the permitting agent automatically pages the on-call engineer. What production-monitoring practice does this represent?
- An emergency-management agency defines a maximum acceptable response-time target for its flood-warning alerting agent, since a slow response during an active flood warning carries real consequences that a routine 311 inquiry does not. What is this response-time target an example of, and why does it differ across the agency's agents?
- A transit authority deploys its trip-planning agent across two separate regions so that an outage in one region does not take resident-facing trip planning offline entirely. What deployment consideration does this reflect?
- After a resident complaint about an incorrect permit-status answer, a city engineer cross-references Cloud Trace spans with Cloud Logging entries to reconstruct exactly what happened during that single request. What does combining the two sources provide that either alone would not?
- A county IT team uses latency figures observed during development-time evaluation runs to set realistic capacity and autoscaling targets before launching their permitting agent into production. What does this practice connect together?
- A library-programs agent's production monitoring flags a recurring pattern of low-quality answers, and the team adds those flagged transcripts to the golden dataset used for evaluation before redeploying an updated version. What practice does this represent?
Securing and governing agentic workflows · 30 questions
- A city permitting chatbot must call a third-party payments API to collect application fees, and the architecture team needs the agent to authenticate to that external tool without embedding long-lived credentials in the agent's code. What approach fits this requirement?
- A 311 resident-service agent should be able to read and write two specific BigQuery datasets holding service-request records, but not the finance department's datasets that happen to share the same project. What should the architecture team configure to enforce this scope?
- A transit authority runs several cooperating agents — dispatch, incident triage, rider notifications — and operations staff want a single place to observe traffic between them and identify which agent issued which tool call. Which component is built for this?
- Before a new docket-summarization agent can serve courthouse clerks in production, an architecture review board wants a required approval and versioning gate so that unreviewed agent builds cannot reach citizens. Which Google Cloud component provides this governance point?
- A public-facing water-utility chatbot has started receiving crafted messages that try to override its system instructions and extract internal prompt content, and the team wants a managed control to catch this pattern rather than relying solely on how the system instructions are worded. Which control fits this need?
- An emergency-management coordination agent on Google Cloud reads incident PDFs from a handful of Cloud Storage buckets, and the security team wants its access limited strictly to those buckets and the read permissions it actually needs. Which approach best satisfies this requirement?
- A school-district IT helpdesk agent can install new skills contributed by different departments, and the CIO wants every skill formally vetted and approved before the agent can use it at runtime. Which Google Cloud capability is built for this?
- A housing authority casework system must clearly distinguish, in every access decision, whether a request originated from a caseworker logging in directly or from an autonomous agent acting on its own schedule. Which Google Cloud capability provides this distinction?
- County IT operates a dozen agents that each call several external SaaS tools, and rotating and auditing OAuth 2.0 tokens individually per agent has become unmanageable for the security team. Which approach addresses this at the architecture level?
- A library program-recommendation agent began issuing an unusually high volume of tool calls overnight, and staff want a control that can automatically throttle or flag this kind of anomaly as it happens. Which Google Cloud capability is designed for that?
- A parks-and-recreation reservation agent runs in one Google Cloud project but must never be able to reach resources in the finance department's separate project, even if a bug in its logic attempts it. Which control enforces this as a hard boundary?
- A public-health case-reporting agent has been redeployed several times, and an auditor needs to reconstruct exactly which agent version handled a specific case report submitted six months ago. Where should the auditor look first?
- A courts clerk workflow agent occasionally drafts responses that echo sensitive case details from records it retrieved, and reviewers want those outgoing responses screened before they reach an external party. Which capability fits this need?
- A transit dispatch system coordinates agents over both A2A and MCP protocols, and the security architect wants one consistent place to enforce policy regardless of which protocol a given interaction uses. What should the architect rely on?
- A permitting-application agent is being extended to process applicant PII, and the governance board requires a documented sign-off step before any agent version handling PII can move to production. How should this be implemented?
- A permitting chatbot is authorized to auto-approve routine applications but must pause and route borderline or high-value permit denials to a staff reviewer before acting. What design achieves this?
- A 311 chatbot keeps receiving messages that try to convince it to ignore its guardrails and reveal internal configuration details, and the team wants a filtering layer specifically aimed at catching this kind of manipulation. What should they add?
- A records-request agent acting on behalf of a specific resident must only surface documents that resident is personally entitled to see, not everything the agent's own service account can technically reach. What design ensures this?
- A county government is deploying an agent across multiple Google Cloud regions and must ensure resident data the agent collects never leaves the jurisdiction's approved region. Where should this constraint be enforced?
- A public-health intake agent stores full conversation transcripts for quality review, and those transcripts must have direct patient identifiers removed before they are retained long-term. Which capability fits this requirement?
- A courts agent's audit logs must be kept long enough to satisfy a records-retention statute but not indefinitely, and the architecture team needs to set that retention deliberately. What should the team do?
- A water-utility operations agent can recommend a valve shutoff based on sensor readings, but the design must ensure it cannot execute that action on its own without an operator confirming it first. What should the architecture include?
- After an incident involving a transit agent's automated rider notifications, the compliance office needs a full trail of every tool call the agent made in the hours before the incident. Where should they reconstruct this from?
- A housing authority eviction-casework agent can draft correspondence freely but must be blocked from invoking the case-status-change tool unless a second, independent verification step has occurred. What kind of control does this require?
- A school-district IT helpdesk agent's tool invocations need to be traceable end-to-end so support staff can diagnose why a particular ticket was routed or escalated incorrectly. Which pairing should the architecture rely on?
- A county clerk records agent must act using the identity of the specific clerk who invoked it, not a single shared service account, so IAM audit trails reflect the actual requester. What design achieves this?
- A permitting agent uses a RAG pipeline that ingests applicant-uploaded PDFs, and one uploaded document contains hidden text instructing the agent to bypass its review checklist. Which capability is designed to catch this before it reaches the model?
- An emergency-management agent can draft public alert messages during a weather event, but the safety design requires a human communications officer to approve wording before any alert is sent. What does this require in the architecture?
- A library recommendation agent's older version is being retired after a security review found it used an overly broad tool permission set, and the team needs to formally deprecate it without breaking dependent workflows. What should they rely on?
- A housing authority casework agent needs Cloud SQL write access, but the design must limit that access to only the specific tables it manages, not the full database used by other city departments. Which approach satisfies this?
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