How actually works fail activity

[Peter_23]

Hi community, I developed a pipeline with simple estructure:

 The notebook activy trigger the fail activity, but I run it, it always throw Failed Status :(,  I think it should be succeeded if the Fail activity works fine.

Env. trial fabric.

In the normal way the @activity(notebbok).output   throw  ErrorCodeNotString

It change the Fail message to @utcNow() because It shoud be the reason of the fail status but  no,   and trying to change the satus "on success" or "on fail" in the previous activy and the same result "Failed".

the message is:

Error code

08/28/2025 02:34:43

Failure typeUser configuration issue

Details

08/28/2025 02:34:43

                              

So is normal status "Fail" to Fail activity? the trial fabric dont suppot failed?

Thanks in advance.

[Peter_23]

Thanks @v-ssriganesh @justinjbird  I now understand the Fail activity,

[v-ssriganesh · Accepted solution]

Hello @Peter_23,
Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Fabric Community Forum. I have reproduced your scenario in a Fabric trial workspace, and here’s what I found:

• The Fail activity is designed to always return pipeline status = Failed (this is by design).
• You can provide your own error message and error code to make the failure more descriptive.

Example configuration I used:

• Fail message: @concat('Notebook execution failed at ', string(utcNow()))
• Error code: NotebookError

Output when Notebook fails → Fail activity runs:

So yes, it is normal for the Fail activity to mark the pipeline as Failed. The trial Fabric environment supports it. the key is that the Fail activity requires both a Fail message (string) and an Error code.

If you instead want to capture the error without failing the pipeline, you can use alternatives like Set Variable or Append Variable activities instead of Fail.

Hope this clarifies.

Best Regards,
Ganesh singamshetty.

[justinjbird]

The fail activity is failing because it expects a string input. Both expressions you tested aren't strings so you would need to convert them to string to use them.