What happens when webhooks were sent but could not be delivered? – URBANTZ | SUPPORT

Sometimes webhooks can't be delivered to the endpoint that was configured. Here is what can be done about it. When a webhook is being set up, you expect information to be sent from Urbantz to another system, based on certain triggers. For various reasons, the receiving endpoint can be unavailable, and webhooks can't be received and treated.

Two options help to minimize the impact of endpoint unavailability: e-mail notifications and the System Monitor. This article focuses on the e-mail option. Overview

Setup
Email content
Webhook retry mechanism
Webhook replay

1. Setup

When setting up webhooks, you will see a toggle that, if enabled, allows you to enter an email address, to which webhook failure notifications should be sent.

An e-mail will be sent if, after a first attempt to send a webhook and two additional retires, we could not deliver the webhook successfully (= total of 3 attempts).
To avoid spamming the email address, e-mails are not sent out in real-time. We aggregate the returns we receive and send an e-mail every 5 minutes (if there were unsuccessful attempts within this 5-minute range).

2. Email content

The e-mail contains the following information:

Endpoint: the URL to which the webhook had to be sent
Unsuccessful payloads (#): how many payloads could not be sent successfully
Encountered errors: Status code(s) and error message(s) returned to us by the endpoint
Attached: the payload(s) in JSON format

Thanks to these e-mails, you can upload the missing information into the system that is to be updated and act on the issue the endpoint is encountering.

3. Webhook retry mechanism

If a webhook fails to send, our system automatically retries it up to 9 times. Only webhooks that remain in a failed state after all 9 retries are stored on our side. The final retry occurs 4 hours after the initial attempt. There is no strict SLA for webhook delivery.

4. Webhook replay

If webhooks fail on your system and the outage lasts longer than the 4-hour retry window, those webhooks will remain in a “failed” status and will not be sent automatically.

You can however, request a replay of these webhooks from Urbantz, and our teams will resend them for you. Please be mindful of the following:

This is a paid intervention. To submit a request, please contact our Support team, who will coordinate internally with Engineering. You must clearly specify the data to be resent (for example: failed task update webhooks sent between 13:00 and 17:00 CET).

We recommend providing as much detail as possible to ensure a fast and accurate replay.