Webhook Guides

What's a Webhook →

A webhook is an HTTP request to send notification and data about an event that occur in a system to another system. Learn how it works and how to implement webhooks effectively.

When to Use Webhooks →

In this article, you will learn when and what scenarios you should be using webhooks. Compared to communication systems; WebSockets, pub/sub, and polling?

Webhooks and Callbacks →

Explore the differences between webhooks and callbacks, their delivery mechanisms, and common event types.

Tutorial →

Follow our step-by-step tutorial on how to set up a webhook with an example for Stripe. Learn what are the important considerations with webhooks in production.

Owning Reliability →

We discuss the root causes of failures experienced when handling webhooks, explore solutions and guide you to the right solution to make your webhooks reliable.

Reliability of Webhook Providers →

This article explains how even though there's a need for resiliency and observability, depending on your webhook provider to provide these features is not recommended.

Stop Processing Synchronously →

This article explains why the event-driven architecture style is the answer to solving webhook resiliency problems, how we can achieve this architecture with queues, and the pain points queues help us remove.

Webhook Gateways →

Learn what a webhook gateway is, its key responsibilities, and why it's essential for managing webhooks in modern software systems. Discover popular solutions and benefits.

Webhook Gateway vs API Gateway →

Webhook gateways and API gateways solve related but fundamentally different problems. Learn how their features compare, when you need one versus the other, and why most production systems need both.

Gateway Migration →

A step-by-step guide to migrating from DIY webhook handling to a managed webhook gateway, covering planning, parallel running, incremental cutover, and common pitfalls.

Queuing Solution Considerations →

This article discusses the features to look out for in an ideal webhook infrastructure solution that helps implement the event-driven approach to handling webhooks.

Fetch Before Process Pattern →

Learn how the 'Fetch Before Process' pattern helps build reliable webhook systems by ensuring you always work with the latest data, and how to implement it at scale without hitting API rate limits.

How Hookdeck Helps →

Webhooks seem simple until they break. Learn the most common webhook challenges — both receiving and sending — and how Hookdeck solves each one with managed infrastructure.

Glossary →

Complete glossary of webhook terminology and concepts. Essential definitions for understanding webhooks, event-driven architecture and Hookdeck.

Best Practices →

In this article, learn what are the practices for setting up , scaling and error recovery to deploy webhooks in production.

Data Integrity →

Learn what causes data integrity issues when working with webhooks and what are the preventive, and corrective strategies to solve them.

Webhook Ordering →

Learn why webhook ordering is challenging, when it actually matters, and practical strategies for building systems that handle out-of-order delivery gracefully.

Idempotency →

Guide on implementing idempotency to prevent taking action on the same webhook multiple times, ensuring data integrity.

Downtime →

Learn what scenarios create webhooks downtime, the issues it makes, and how to manage it with Hookdeck to mitigate its impacts.

Delivery Guarantees →

Learn the differences between at-least-once and exactly-once webhook delivery semantics, their trade-offs, and how to implement each approach in production.

Exactly-Once Delivery →

How managed webhook services achieve exactly-once processing through deduplication, idempotency, retries, and ordering controls on top of at-least-once delivery.

Thin Events →

Learn about thin events - a notification-only webhook pattern that ensures data consistency by signaling changes without carrying full state. Understand the difference between thin and fat events and when to use each approach.

Thin Events Best Practices →

Learn how to implement the thin events pattern effectively with practical guidance on the fetch-before-process pattern, operational best practices, and code examples.

Dead-Letter Queues →

Learn how dead-letter queues provide a safety net for webhook events that fail processing, enabling debugging and replay workflows.

DLQ Alternatives →

Explore alternative patterns to dead-letter queues for handling failed webhook events, including database persistence, circuit breakers, and issue-based management.

Introduction to Webhook Problems →

An overview of problems encountered when working with webhooks in production environments, and our recommended solutions.

Testing →

The most common testing problems you might run into and how to solve them with Hookdeck.

Managing →

The most common management problems faced when working with webhooks and how to solve them with Hookdeck

Monitoring →

A summary of some of the most common webhook monitoring problems, and how to solve them with Hookdeck.

Observability →

How to architect observability for production webhook systems, covering metrics, dashboards, tracing, replay workflows, alerting, and integration with Datadog, Prometheus, and New Relic.

Error Recovery →

The most common error recovery problems you might run into when working with webhooks and how to solve them with Hookdeck.

Retries →

Learn how to build a resilient webhook retry system with exponential backoff, jitter, response code handling, dead-letter queues, circuit breakers, and more.

Test Types →

Learn different types of tests to detect and eliminate bugs from webhook processing, help scale appropriately, and improve webhook processing performance.

Guide on Troubleshooting →

Learn what brings bugs in the process of developing with webhooks, how to tackle these bugs, and tools that can help the troubleshooting and debugging process.

Troubleshooting Guide →

A comprehensive guide to troubleshooting and debugging webhook issues — covering missing events, duplicate deliveries, timeouts, signature failures, and replay debugging with practical examples.

Webhook Security 101 →

Learn what are the security vulnerabilities of webhooks and explore the different strategies for mitigating the security flaws.

Vulnerabilities →

Learn about strategies to safeguard against webhook security vulnerabilities including HMAC verification, replay attacks, PII handling, and access control.

Checklist →

Learn how to secure webhooks; cover data encryption, source verification, consumer verification, message verification, and replay attack prevention.

Authentication Strategies →

Learn what are the webhook authentication strategies available to developers today. Supported by a comparison table between each method to help you make an informed decision when selecting an authentication strategy.

Webhook Handshakes and Challenges →

Learn about webhook handshakes and challenges, and how to implement them.

Implement SHA256 →

Learn how signature verification works and see code examples on how to implement SHA256 signature verification for the most popular coding languages.

Gateway Security →

How centralizing webhook security in a gateway eliminates scattered verification logic, fragmented secrets management, and inconsistent authentication across providers.

Introduction →

Introduction to a multi-part series which will give you a complete understanding of the issues faced by teams using webhooks, how to measure the risk, and how to use Hookdeck to handle webhooks.

Difficulties in Production →

Focuses on the journey of a development team that just deployed webhooks to production, including the issues and impacts of them, as well as solutions.

Choosing a Management Strategy →

The different strategies teams can take in dealing with issues arising from making webhooks resilient in production environment

Microservices →

Learn why microservices architectures benefit from a dedicated event gateway for webhook communication, and what changes when you adopt one.

Fan-Out →

How to distribute a single inbound webhook event to multiple destinations reliably, covering fan-out patterns, DIY approaches, common challenges, and how a webhook gateway simplifies multicasting.

Webhook Management Guide →

Webhook management covers the reliability, security, routing, and observability challenges that emerge at scale. Learn how Hookdeck's Event Gateway, Outpost, CLI, and Console address them across the full event lifecycle.

Hookdeck's Solution →

All the requirements to deploy reliable webhooks and how Hookdeck takes the burden off your development team

Asynchronous Processing →

Learn about implementing asynchronous processing to handle volume spikes in a timely and efficient way.

Webhook Producers →

Learn what are the important considerations to account for when working with webhook producers, how to improve response time, and what we can do to scale their operations.

Message Queue →

Learn how to manage traffic spike by asynchronously processing webhooks. We look at the API Gateway and Message Broker with a focus on the implementation and performance considerations for deploying these components in production environments.

Performance Monitoring →

Learn how to set up performance monitoring and how you can set KPIs that can help in estimating the resources required to meet your performance targets for you webhook infrastructure.

Webhook Infrastructure →

Webhook infrastructure covers the queuing, retry logic, authentication, and observability needed to receive and send events reliably. Learn what it involves and how to build a production-grade stack.

Requirements and Architecture →

Learn about the requirements to build an infrastructure to manage webhooks and how to translate them into a high-level architecture design.

Infrastructure Components →

Learn about each component in a webhook infrastructure architecture. We define their purpose, implementation options, design, and scalability considerations.

Build vs Buy Guide →

Learn the business and technical arguments when deciding either to build or buy your webhook infrastructure.

Building Open Source and Cloud Services →

Learn how to build a webhook management solution using RabbitMQ for Open Source and AWS for cloud services. For each solution, we will take a look at the pros and cons of the approach.

Webhook vs DIY Event Infrastructure →

A practical comparison weighing build-versus-buy decisions on webhook delivery, retries, observability, and operational complexity.

Event Gateway →

An event gateway ingests, filters, transforms, and reliably delivers events across your architecture. Learn what event gateways do, how they compare to API gateways and message brokers, and how to evaluate one.

Event Gateway vs Message Broker →

Event gateways and message brokers both handle asynchronous communication, but they solve different problems. Learn when to use each and where they overlap.

Event Gateway vs Event Mesh →

Event gateways and event meshes both manage asynchronous event flows, but at different scales and layers. Learn how they compare and when they complement each other.

Webhooks and AI Agents →

Most AI systems wait for an event before they act, and that event is almost always a webhook. This guide maps the five patterns developers use to connect webhooks to AI agents, MCP servers, and LLM tools like Claude — and the failure modes they all share.

What Is MCP Events? →

MCP Events is a draft MCP extension that lets AI agents subscribe to events from MCP servers. How it works, who supports it, and how to deliver events reliably.

Add Events to Your MCP Server →

A backend developer's guide to building MCP Events yourself: subscriptions, your own queues and workers, signing, SSRF, retries and fan-out at scale.

MCP Events Resources →

Guides, demos and a video on MCP Events, the draft MCP extension that lets AI agents subscribe to events from MCP servers: how it works, sending events, receiving them, and trying it now.