CompTIA Data+ DA0-002 (V2) Practice Question

The goal is to catch stale data (data that is older than the expected refresh cycle) and to notify the analytics team only when a true problem emerges. Triggering an alert when the timestamp of the most recent successful refresh is more than 90 minutes (60 minutes × refresh cadence + 30 minutes tolerance) in the past directly measures data freshness. If the data fails to refresh on schedule, the alert fires; if the refresh succeeds, no alert is generated, so alert fatigue is minimized.

• An alert on row-count variance might not fire when the refresh fails but the previous record count remains static, so stale data could persist undetected.
• CPU-utilization alerts watch infrastructure, not data freshness; high CPU may occur without stale data, and stale data can occur without high CPU.
• Notifying every time any metric changes would generate a message at every successful refresh, overwhelming recipients and obscuring real problems.

Monitoring alerts are intended to watch key metrics (such as last-refresh age) and send notifications only when those metrics cross a threshold. This aligns with recommended practices for Power BI data alerts and metric-absence/freshness alerts in cloud-monitoring platforms.