Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer Practice Exam

Which Google Cloud product should you utilize to explore network traffic using payloads and headers?

1. Cloud Armor

2. Packet Mirroring

3. Cloud Logging

4. VPC Flow Logs

The correct answer is: Packet Mirroring

Packet Mirroring is the correct choice for exploring network traffic using payloads and headers. It is a feature that allows you to capture and analyze packet-level data from your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network. By mirroring traffic to a specified destination, you can examine the detailed contents of packets, including their headers and payloads. This is crucial for security analysis and diagnosing network issues, as it provides insights into the exact data being transmitted across your network. In contrast, other options serve different purposes: Cloud Armor is primarily a web application firewall that protects applications from DDoS attacks and other vulnerabilities, but does not provide deep packet inspection capabilities. Cloud Logging is designed for managing logs and events generated by your applications and services, focusing on log data rather than raw network traffic. VPC Flow Logs, while useful for providing details about the virtual network's traffic, only capture metadata such as source and destination IP addresses, ports, and bytes transferred, without giving insights into the payload content itself. Therefore, for in-depth network traffic exploration, packet mirroring is the most appropriate choice.