How actually works fail activity

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.