GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Question

Your data engineering team manages a streaming Dataflow pipeline that should run 24/7 in the us-central1 region. A Cloud Function executed by a service account must run a gcloud command to obtain the job's current lifecycle state (for example RUNNING, FAILED, DONE) so it can decide whether to alert on failures. The script must be read-only and must not modify the job. Which gcloud command satisfies this requirement?

gcloud dataflow jobs list --region=us-central1 --filter="id=$JOB_ID" --format='value(state)'
gcloud dataflow operations describe $JOB_ID --region=us-central1
gcloud dataflow jobs update $JOB_ID --region=us-central1 --enable_monitoring
gcloud dataflow jobs describe $JOB_ID --region=us-central1 --format='value(currentState)'

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Answer Description

The gcloud dataflow jobs describe command is designed to retrieve metadata about a single job. When you supply the job ID and region, the command returns a full JSON response that includes the field currentState, which reports values such as JOB_STATE_RUNNING, JOB_STATE_FAILED, or JOB_STATE_DONE. Adding a --format flag lets a script extract only that field without altering the job in any way.

The jobs list command can show multiple jobs and does not return the explicit currentState field in a structured way; parsing its tabular output is unreliable. The jobs update command would attempt to change job settings, violating the read-only requirement. operations describe expects an operation ID, not a Dataflow job ID, so it will fail for regular job monitoring.

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