Conquer the Google Cloud Data Engineer Challenge 2025 – Elevate Your Tech Game!

Setting up alerts on Cloud Monitoring based on system lag is an effective method to proactively monitor and resolve issues in a Dataflow pipeline because it allows you to gain real-time insights into the performance and efficiency of your pipeline. By monitoring system lag, you can identify bottlenecks and performance degradation as they happen, which enables timely intervention before these issues escalate and affect the overall processing flow.

System lag measures the difference between the current processing time and the intended processing time, essentially reflecting how far behind your pipeline is in relation to real-time data ingestion. When lag exceeds a predefined threshold, Cloud Monitoring can trigger alerts, prompting immediate action to diagnose and resolve the problem. This proactive approach helps maintain optimal performance and ensures that the pipeline continues to operate efficiently, which is critical for timely data analytics and decision-making.

In contrast, other options like reviewing logs or dashboards do provide valuable insights but are often reactive measures that do not prevent issues from affecting the pipeline's performance. Monitoring system lag with alerts ensures you're ahead of potential issues, making it the most effective strategy among the options presented.