The easiest way to pass Google's Generative AI Leader exam

Łukasz Pracki — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:28:18 +0000

I've recently passed the Generative AI Leader from Google Cloud and here's what I think is the easiest way to obtain the certification.

First of all, I think that the Gen AI Leader is a very good certification for everybody interested in the topic of Generative AI. If you've already had a chance to play with Gemini, Nano Banana or other Google's tools, and want to find a practical implementation for that new technology in your daily work, that exam is for you.

In my opinion, you just need two things to pass it:

be familiar with Google's Gen AI tools
do a quick course on Gen AI from Google's Skills platform

Be familiar with Google's Gen AI tools

A lot of questions on the exam will test your knowledge of Google's product palette in the Gen AI realm. Therefore, it is a good idea to get familiar with them beforehand. Try Gemini, Nano Banana or just experiment with Google's AI Studio.
Check the different options available in those tools, especially in AI Studio's Playground. Test the different models, tools and advanced settings and understand what they do.

Links to check out:
https://gemini.google.com/app
https://aistudio.google.com/

Do a quick course on Gen AI from Google's Skills platform

Besides practical knowledge it is good to know the basics of how Gen AI works. Google released an excellent set of online courses that present Gen AI in a nutshell. Some of the concepts will sound familiar if you've already played with AI tools, and the rest will be a good supplement, filling up the knowledge gaps.
Each part of the learning path concludes with a one-pager with the most important topics. This is very handy, but in my opinion it is a good idea to browse through the course after completion to look for some keywords that were not included in the one-pagers.

Links to check out:
https://www.skills.google/paths/1951

By following those 2 simple steps, you will increase your chances of passing the Generative AI Leader exam significantly. Good luck!

GCP Undocumented: Fix Error 403: Permission to delete log notification rules denied

Łukasz Pracki — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 12:56:59 +0000

This is a part of a series where I post solutions to problems I solved when working with Google Cloud as a Cloud Engineer. In many cases, I couldn't find those fixes in the Internet myself, and I want to document them to act as a future reference.

I'm currently creating some Cloud Monitoring Alerting Policies using Terraform. The policy we'll discuss today is the one for Service Health.

The Service Health page lets you see any active issues with Google Cloud services affecting your workloads.

You can easily create an alerting policy from that page, so you can receive a notification almost instantly, when something happens to Google's infrastructure running your applications.

Here's an example of Terraform code for this alerting policy:

resource "google_monitoring_alert_policy" "service_health_alerts" {
  combiner     = "OR"
  display_name = "Service Health - All incidents, all updates"
  enabled      = true
  notification_channels = [
    google_monitoring_notification_channel.notification-channel-email.name,
  ]
  project     = var.scoping_project
  user_labels = {}

  alert_strategy {
    auto_close           = "1800s"
    notification_prompts = []

    notification_rate_limit {
      period = "300s"
    }
  }

  conditions { [redacted] }
  documentation { [redacted] }
}

The Problem

Somehow all went well when I created the policy with code and applied it. The problem started when I tried to apply any changes to the Terraform resource - changes as simple as switching the policy from enabled = true to enabled = false.

All I was getting with the terraform apply command was the following error:

googleapi: Error 403: Permission to delete log notification rules denied (or the resource may not exist).

This exact error was not documented anywhere.

The Solution

It took me hours to find out but the solution is quite simple.

To create the policy from code, I was using the account that had the Owner role on the monitoring project.

The error came up when the terraform apply command was issued with a GitHub Actions Service Account, which didn't have an Owner role.

The Service Account was a Monitoring AlertPolicy Editor on this project, but that was not enough. To work with a Service Health alert policy, it also needed to be a Logs Configuration Writer on the monitoring project.

Lessons Learned

Here's what I'll take out from this case:

Always verify which account you use to implement changes from the code.
To create and change the alerting policy for Google Cloud Service Health monitoring, your principal needs two roles: Monitoring AlertPolicy Editor and Logs Configuration Writer.

Forem: Łukasz Pracki