Inner activity succeeded, outer activity failed

[FabianSchut]

Hi all,

I am seeing a strange status in my monitoring hub. I have a data pipeline with an If activity. Within the If activity, there is a copy data activity with retry enabled. The copy data activity is succeeded, but the output shows an error message with Status Failed (400) with the message "Object reference not set to an instance of an object.". The time cap between the duration of the If statement and the copy data looks like the retry was activated. Now I have two questions:

1. Is it possible to see whether the retry was actually activated in any of the monitoring/logs?

2. Did anybody had the same problem with the outer activity to fail while all inner activities succeeded? In my opinion, if the activity succeeded at the retry, the outer activity should also succeed.

[v-prasare]

Hi @FabianSchut,

If your issue still persists, please consider raising a support ticket for further assistance as @tayloramy suggested
To raise a support ticket for Fabric and Power BI, kindly follow the steps outlined in the following guide:

How to create a Fabric and Power BI Support ticket - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Thanks,

prashanth

[tayloramy]

Hi @FabianSchut, 

THis is facinating. If you click on the pipeline in the monitor hub, it willt ake you to that specific execution run and you will be able to see all the things that ran for that execution. 

Do you see the copy data activity running twice in there? 

I'm wondering if this is just a metadata error with the monitor hub displaying that it retried, but it didn't actually retry. So the error is actually an error occuring on the monitor hub side while trying to get run details for an activity run instance that never happened? 

Just a hunch though. 

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[FabianSchut]

Hi @tayloramy thank you for your answer. I don't see the copy data activity twince. Only once. I also used the API Query Activity Runs, but the response showed no retries. So I think no actual retry occured, still strange that the time cap is there and the outer activity failed, while the inner activity succeeded.

[tayloramy]

Very strange. 

If you checked both the execution page, and the API, and those show no retry, then I think you are safe in your conclusion that no real retry occured. 

DOes this happen every time you run this notebook? If so, I recommend opening a ticket so the support team can figure out what is going on. Usually the hardest part about troubleshooting bugs like this is being able to reprodeuce them reliably. 

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[FabianSchut]

We raised a ticket for Microsoft indeed. Since it is an on-prem connection, they suggested to update the gateway. We will try that, but I don't think that will actually solve the problem. Reproducibility is indeed the hardest part here. The issue is not occuring anymore. However, we want to prevent these failures to happen in the future. For now, we will pause debugging until the issue occurs again. Thank you for your help.

[tayloramy]

Best of luck @FabianSchut, 

Hopefully the issue was secretly patched and won't happen again. Keep us updated if it comes back. 

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