Various heat-treated and surface coating methods are used to mitigate abrasion in sliding machine parts. The most cost effective of these methods involves hard coatings such as diamond-like carbon (DLC). DLC has various advantages, including a high level of hardness, low coefficient of friction, and low wear rate. In practice, a supporting layer is generally inserted between the DLC layer and the steel substrate to improve the load carrying capacity. In this study, an indentation and sliding contact problem involving a small, hard, spherical particle and a DLC-coated steel surface is modeled and analyzed using a nonlinear finite element code, MARC, to investigate the influence of the supporting layer thickness on the coating characteristics and the related coating failure mechanisms. The results show that the amount of plastic deformation and the maximum principal stress decrease with an increase in the supporting layer thickness. However, the probability of the high tensile stress within the coating layer causing a crack is greatly increased. Therefore, in the case of DLC coating with a supporting layer, fatigue wear can be another important cause of coating layer failure, together with the generally well-known abrasive wear.