As a HubSpot Partner, Nadja is focused on helping their clients take advantage of the platform from installation to building custom automation and apps. Nadja’s projects mostly consist of automating HubSpot workflows with other SaaS platforms, which they build using Integromat (recently rebranded as “Make”). Nadja’s expertise is reflected by their presence as one of the two Integromat Expert+ partners in Japan.
Webhooks are a crucial component of the solutions Nadja builds on Integromat. Their workflow often starts with an event triggered in HubSpot. Not only does missing webhooks mean a negative experience for their clients, but it also requires developer and customer support effort to solve the issue.
Kan Murota is a self-taught developer-turned-system engineer. At Nadja his role ranges from solution architecture design all the way to implementation, where he uses Integromat on top of coding and cloud infrastructure.
Kan loves Integromat because he believes it is one of the most flexible and robust low-code tools that enables builders such as his non-technical teammates to work on complex workflows with its drag and drop. However, the product is focused on delivering the workflow experience which can sometimes lead to falling short in other areas like the experience and visibility of webhooks.
As the only full-fledged developer on the team, Kan’s responsibilities include making sure the solutions Nadja delivers to clients are reliable.
Kan is concerned about what will happen to the webhooks he missed from HubSpot during a downtime and how to recover after Integromat is back online.
“Integromat has a history of going down twice a year because they operate from a data center in the Czech Republic. I’m worried about having to think of scenarios related to recovery and its impact on my solutions.”
Integromat’s maximum queue size is 10,000 events (for every 10,000 operations licensed per month, you can have up to 667 items in each webhook's queue; the maximum number is 10,000 items in the webhook's queue), after which it will start dropping webhooks by responding with the HTTP Status Code 400 to new incoming events. It is in fact not uncommon that large customers go over the limit.
Visibility
First of all, Kan doesn't have visibility when something fails in the queue.
Replay
Then without a replay functionality, Kan has to manually retrigger each workflow to start troubleshooting and then use Postman to replay each failed webhook one at a time.
Performance
Kan also looked at the performance. When the queue answers HubSpot webhooks in over 5 seconds, it times out (it used to be even less time).
Kan has looked into building queues on Pub/Sub from scratch, which would allow him to capture webhooks in the event of downtime and recover from it. He is very familiar with the product, having done this at his past job, but also knows how much time it takes to set up.
Kan heard about Hookdeck through Integromat’s Facebook community when another user had issues with Pipedrive’s webhooks. After a simple test, he quickly realized Hookdeck’s solution was what he needed.
Hookdeck’s resilient system gave Kan confidence that he could trust Hookdeck to manage his webhooks and recover directly from Hookdeck.
Webhook ingestion availability
With redundant ingestion and a high availability system, Kan relies on Hookdeck to receive all his webhooks.
Throttle webhook delivery
Kan uses Hookdeck’s rate limit feature to throttle the delivery of webhooks so his servers can safely consume batch updates triggered from human routine workflow. Previously, this use case would commonly crash his servers due to the number of events received in a very small time window.
Recover from errors
On his own, Kan estimates it can take him a month to build a simple queuing system and an entire week of work per subscription. With 2 new projects per month, the math didn’t allow for him to re-build the wheel each time.
With Hookdeck, it takes him less than 15 minutes to set up. Gone are the days of setting up Pub/Sub, building error handlers, or waiting around.
Using Hookdeck, Kan is able to help Nadja take full advantage of Integromat’s low-code platform and focus on business value while leaving webhook reliability to Hookdeck.