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Troubleshooting Scenario Questions

Practise AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate DEA-C01 practice questions — original exam-style scenarios covering every exam domain, with detailed explanations, wrong-answer analysis, and common exam traps.

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15
scenario questions
DEA-C01
exam code
Amazon Web Services
vendor

Scenario guide

How to approach troubleshooting scenario questions

These questions describe a network symptom and ask you to identify the root cause or the correct fix. They appear across all certification exams and reward systematic thinking over memorisation. The best candidates follow a consistent troubleshooting framework even under time pressure.

Quick answer

Troubleshooting Scenario Questions questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.

How the topic appears in realistic exam-style scenarios.

Which detail in the question changes the correct answer.

How to eliminate plausible but wrong options.

How to connect the question back to the wider exam objective.

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DEA-C01 troubleshooting practice questions

Targeted DEA-C01 practice covering DEA-C01 troubleshooting.

Practice set

Practice scenarios

Question 1mediummultiple choice
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A data engineer is troubleshooting a Kinesis Data Analytics application that processes streaming data. The application is falling behind and has a high 'MillisBehindLatest' metric. The application uses a parallelism of 2. The source stream has 4 shards. What is the MOST likely cause and solution?

Question 2mediummultiple choice
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A data engineer is troubleshooting a failed AWS Glue ETL job that reads from and writes to the S3 bucket 'example-bucket'. The job's IAM role has the policy shown in the exhibit. The job fails with an Access Denied error when writing to a prefix 'output/'. Which permission is MISSING?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.

IAM Policy:
{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:PutObject"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::example-bucket/*"
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "s3:ListBucket",
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::example-bucket"
        }
    ]
}
Question 3hardmultiple choice
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A data engineer is troubleshooting a Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream that is experiencing high error rates when writing to an S3 bucket. The error logs indicate 'AccessDenied' errors. The S3 bucket policy allows access from the Firehose service, but the errors persist. What is the most likely cause?

Question 4mediummulti select
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A data engineer is troubleshooting a Glue ETL job that reads from an S3 bucket and writes to a Redshift table. The job fails with a 'MemoryError' when processing a large dataset. Which TWO actions should the engineer take to resolve this issue? (Choose TWO.)

Question 5hardmultiple choice
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Refer to the exhibit. A data engineer is troubleshooting an IAM policy attached to a user. The user reports that they cannot upload objects to the S3 bucket 'data-lake-bucket' unless they explicitly specify the 'x-amz-server-side-encryption' header with value 'AES256'. The engineer wants to modify the policy to allow uploads without requiring encryption headers, but still enforce encryption on the bucket itself. Which change should the engineer make?

Exhibit

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "s3:PutObject",
        "s3:GetObject",
        "s3:DeleteObject"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:s3:::data-lake-bucket/*",
        "arn:aws:s3:::data-lake-bucket"
      ],
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "s3:x-amz-server-side-encryption": "AES256"
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": "s3:PutObject",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::data-lake-bucket/*",
      "Condition": {
        "StringNotEquals": {
          "s3:x-amz-server-side-encryption": "AES256"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}
Question 6hardmulti select
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A data engineer is troubleshooting a failed AWS Glue ETL job that reads from an S3 bucket. The job logs show the following error: 'java.lang.RuntimeException: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: Class org.apache.hadoop.fs.s3a.S3AFileSystem not found'. Which TWO actions will resolve this issue?

Question 7hardmultiple choice
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A company uses AWS Lake Formation to manage access to data in S3. A data analyst reports being unable to query a table in Amazon Athena, receiving an 'Access Denied' error. The analyst has SELECT permission on the table in Lake Formation. What additional configuration is MOST likely causing the issue?

Question 8hardmulti select
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Which THREE are valid considerations when troubleshooting data loss in an AWS Glue ETL job? (Choose three.)

Question 9mediummultiple choice
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A data engineer is troubleshooting a Kinesis Data Analytics application that processes streaming data. The application is falling behind, and the metric 'MillisBehindLatest' is consistently above 60000. The source Kinesis stream has 10 shards, and the application uses a Flink application with default parallelism. What is the MOST likely cause of the lag?

Question 10easymultiple choice
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A data engineer is troubleshooting a failed AWS Glue ETL job that reads from an S3 bucket and writes to an Amazon Redshift table. The job logs show a permission error. Which IAM policy change would resolve the issue?

Question 11easymultiple choice
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A data engineer needs to troubleshoot why an AWS Glue job is failing with a 'Insufficient Memory' error. The job processes a 10 GB dataset. Which step should the engineer take FIRST?

Question 12mediummultiple choice
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A company uses AWS Lake Formation to manage permissions on a data lake stored in S3. A data scientist is unable to query a table in Amazon Athena, receiving an 'Access Denied' error. The data scientist has IAM permissions to call Athena and has been granted SELECT permission on the table in Lake Formation. What is the most likely cause?

Question 13easymultiple choice
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A data engineer is troubleshooting a failed AWS Glue Crawler. The crawler logs show 'Insufficient permissions to access S3 bucket'. What should the engineer do to resolve this?

Question 14hardmultiple choice
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A data engineer is troubleshooting an AWS Glue job that writes data to an Amazon S3 bucket in Parquet format. The job runs successfully but the output files are smaller than the configured 'groupFiles' size. The engineer has set 'groupFiles' to 'inPartition' and 'groupSize' to 1 GB. The input data is 10 GB in a single partition. What is the most likely reason for the small files?

Question 15hardmultiple choice
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A data engineer is troubleshooting an Amazon DynamoDB table that has frequent throttling exceptions for write requests. The table has auto scaling enabled. What is the most likely cause?

These DEA-C01 practice questions are part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style DEA-C01 questions with detailed explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics.