A data engineer must show auditors which upstream files and which Dataflow pipeline steps produced a reporting table in BigQuery, so that each table can be traced back to its origins. Which capability should the engineer use?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: C
Automated data lineage in Dataplex Universal Catalog captures relationships between data assets and the processes that move or transform them, including BigQuery jobs and supported Dataflow pipelines. It builds a graph from sources to targets, which lets auditors follow how a table was derived. Labels and descriptions are manual metadata and do not record the flow, and monitoring metrics show volume and health rather than provenance.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Descriptions and labels are metadata typed by people, so they can drift from reality and do not record the actual upstream files or transformation steps.
- B. Exported job events form a raw log that someone must parse and join by hand, and the result is not a graph showing how the table was derived.
- D. Monitoring tracks throughput and health metrics such as row counts, which show how much data arrived but not where it came from or how it was transformed.