Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer Practice Exam

Which feature should be utilized to capture VPC traffic for analysis without missing significant events?

1. VPC Flow Logs

2. Packet Mirroring

3. Cloud Monitoring

4. Cloud Armor

The correct answer is: Packet Mirroring

Packet Mirroring is the recommended feature for capturing VPC traffic for analysis because it allows you to analyze the actual packets traversing your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network. This capability provides deep insights into the traffic flow and can capture a complete set of packets, including all TCP/UDP headers and payload data, without losing significant events. This granular level of detail is particularly valuable for performing security analysis, intrusion detection, and troubleshooting network issues. VPC Flow Logs, while useful for capturing metadata about the traffic flowing to and from VPC network interfaces, summarize traffic and do not capture the complete packet data. This makes them less suitable for detailed analysis where the content of the packets is required. Cloud Monitoring serves the purpose of tracking system performance and health metrics but does not capture network traffic directly. It focuses more on monitoring the resources and services rather than specific packet data. Cloud Armor is primarily a web application firewall and provides protection against threats like DDoS attacks. It does not provide traffic capture capabilities. Thus, Packet Mirroring stands out due to its ability to capture traffic at the packet level, ensuring no important information is lost during the analysis process.