To ensure that messages failing to process in your Dataflow job are sent to a Pub/Sub topic for monitoring and alerting, the best approach is to use Pub/Sub’s dead-letter topic feature. Here’s why option C is the best choice:

Dead-Letter Topic:

Pub/Sub’s dead-letter topic feature allows messages that fail to be processed successfully to be redirected to a specified topic. This ensures that these messages are not lost and can be reviewed for debugging and alerting purposes.

Monitoring and Alerting:

By specifying a new Pub/Sub topic as the dead-letter topic, you can use Cloud Monitoring to track metrics such as subscription/dead_letter_message_count, providing visibility into the number of failed messages.

This allows you to set up alerts based on these metrics to notify the appropriate teams when failures occur.

Steps to Implement:

Enable Dead-Letter Topic:

Configure your Pub/Sub pull subscription to enable dead lettering and specify the new Pub/Sub topic for dead-letter messages.

Set Up Monitoring:

Use Cloud Monitoring to monitor the subscription/dead_letter_message_count metric on your pull subscription.

Configure alerts based on this metric to notify the team of any processing failures.

Reference Links:

Pub/Sub Dead Letter Policy

Cloud Monitoring with Pub/Sub