DEA-C01 Data Operations and Support Practice Question
A data engineer is setting up a data pipeline using AWS Glue. The engineer wants to monitor job failures and receive notifications. Which TWO services can be used together for this purpose?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse AWS Step Functions (A) as a monitoring tool because it can orchestrate retries, but it does not natively send notifications and is not the primary service for monitoring Glue job failures.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch (B) is correct because AWS Glue automatically publishes job metrics and logs to CloudWatch, and you can create CloudWatch alarms that trigger when a Glue job fails (for example, on the glue.driver.aggregate.numFailedTasks metric or a FAILED job run state). Amazon SNS (C) is correct because it is the notification service that CloudWatch alarms target via an SNS topic, delivering email, SMS, or HTTP notifications to subscribers when a Glue job failure alarm fires. Together, CloudWatch detects the failure and SNS delivers the alert, which is the standard AWS pattern for Glue job failure notifications. AWS Step Functions (A) can orchestrate Glue jobs but is not a monitoring/notification service, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (D) is for real-time streaming ingestion, and Amazon SQS (E) is a message queue for decoupling applications, so none of these provide the alarm-and-notify capability required here.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS Step Functions
Why it's wrong here
Step Functions orchestrates workflows and state machines; it does not itself watch Glue job runs or send failure notifications. It tempts because it can invoke Glue jobs and branch on their outcomes, which would suit coordinating a pipeline rather than alerting on failures.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch
Why this is correct
Amazon CloudWatch captures Glue job metrics and emits events on state changes such as FAILED, satisfying the requirement to detect job failures. Combined with Amazon SNS for notification delivery, it forms the monitoring half of the pair. Glue natively publishes logs and metrics to CloudWatch, so no custom instrumentation is needed.
- ✓
Amazon SNS
Why this is correct
Amazon SNS delivers the notifications: Glue publishes job-state events to Amazon EventBridge, which routes failure events to an SNS topic, and subscribers receive email or SMS alerts. This satisfies the requirement to monitor job failures and be notified, complementing the second service needed for event matching.
- ✗
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Why it's wrong here
Kinesis Data Streams ingests and transports real-time records; it neither detects Glue job state changes nor delivers alerts. It tempts because it is a core streaming service, and would be correct for capturing event data feeding the pipeline, not for failure monitoring.
- ✗
Amazon SQS
Why it's wrong here
Amazon SQS is a message queue, not a notification delivery service; it cannot send alerts to engineers when a Glue job fails. It is tempting because SQS decouples pipeline components, and it would be correct for buffering events between producers and consumers, not for failure alerting.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DEA-C01 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the DEA-C01 exam.