how to set failure notification on the pipeline level

Hi jeanwang, 

I would approach this using variables. 

Have a variable in your pipeline for "hasFailed" or something similar with a default value of 0, and at the end of every step, if it failed, set that variable to 1.  

Then at the end of the pipeline, check the value of that variable, if it is 1, then send a failure email. 

You can also add more variaqbles for FailureStep and FailureReason to give a more complete error message. 

Hi jeanwang 

Another option is to set up a Power Automate flow, which you can then call when something fails. This makes it easier because it sits outside of the Fabric ecosystem as well as being super reliable. I've been using this for years with my customers. https://www.fourmoo.com/2025/02/12/getting-notified-when-a-microsoft-fabric-notebook-fails/ 

Hi jeanwang​,

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Thank you.

Hi jeanwang​, there are many ways to approach your challenge that the community suggested above. Let me add a couple more:

1. Run a monitoring pipeline or a job that calls Fabric REST API and checks statuses of recent pipeline runs and sends notifications for each found failure. This is somewhat similar to what you could see in Fabric monitoring hub only it allows you to implement your own custom failure handling. You can implement a REST API call in Python code in either a Python Notebook or a UDF and run them from a factory pipeline.
2. Create a parent pipeline that first executes your own pipeline as a child activity and next executes a notification activity only if the child pipeline fails. This approach is simple and you can even parameterize the parent pipeline with a child pipeline ID so it runs any of your pipelines and sends a notification if a child pipeline fails. The parent pipeline will fully rely on the platform failure detection and won't care which activity in a child pipeline failed but you can use a pipeline activity output to build a custom error message for your notification.

Hi jeanwang​,

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Thank you

The platform only sends a failure alert when the pipeline run ends in Failed, so the easiest way to get a single alert is to add a final step that fails if any earlier step failed.

Hi jeanwang​,

If these pipelines are running on a schedule, I would use the built-in pipeline failure notifications rather than adding an email activity after every step.

In the pipeline, go to Home > Schedule, then add the users or groups under Failure notifications.

That notification is tied to the overall pipeline run, so you get one failure notification when the scheduled pipeline fails rather than an email for each individual activity.

The main thing to watch is your dependency logic. If you deliberately handle an activity failure and allow the rest of the pipeline to continue, make sure the overall pipeline still ends in a Failed state. Otherwise Fabric has no pipeline-level failure to notify on.

If you need the pipeline to continue processing after an intermediate failure, I would usually keep track of whether anything failed and then use a Fail activity at the end when that flag is set. That way the remaining steps can run, but the final pipeline status is still Failed and the scheduled failure notification fires once.

For manual or on-demand runs, Microsoft currently notes that these built-in failure notifications are not sent. In that case I would use a single Office 365 Outlook activity at the end instead, based on the same failure flag.

AI-assisted drafting: AI was used to help structure and phrase this response. I reviewed and validated the technical content before posting.