You created a new project with billing via gcloud and must perform prerequisites before creating a Compute Engine VM from the CLI. What should you do?

Before you can create Compute Engine VMs, the Compute Engine API must be enabled for your project. This API provides the necessary services and resources for managing virtual machines. Creating a Cloud Monitoring workspace is for monitoring, not VM creation. A default VPC network is automatically created with a new project, so explicitly creating one isn't a prerequisite unless you need a custom network. While having the Compute Admin role is useful, enabling the API is a fundamental project-level prerequisite that must occur first, as even an admin cannot create VMs if the service itself is not active.