If you deploy your spark job on YARN with client deploy mode, be aware that the YARN application is always shown as SUCCEEDED on YARN resource manager site even if the Spark job fails.

See the following Jira ticket

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-11058

Note from Spark docs:

--deploy-mode: Whether to deploy your driver on the worker nodes (cluster) or locally as an external client (client) (default: client)