Webhooks send data from Ontraport to other systems, like registering a contact for your webinar. If the other system is down, or a setting is wrong, a delivery can fail. In this lesson, you'll get alerted when that happens, find out why, fix it, and resend the failed requests the right way.
First, make sure someone hears about failures. Click your profile icon, then Administration, then Integrations, then Webhook failure notification. Click Add, enter the email addresses of the people who should know, and click Save. Each failed webhook sends them an email with the endpoint it was sent to and the response code. To keep inboxes manageable, you'll get at most ten of these emails per endpoint each day.
Next, look at what happened. Go to Administration, then Integrations, then Webhook Logs. Your account keeps the last ten thousand webhook activities. Each row shows the request, its response code, the date and the response data. You can add columns for the type, like an automation map, a form or the API, and for the webhook's name, so you know where it came from.
Click a request to see its details: the headers, the method, the address it went to, and what the other system sent back. The response code tells you whether it succeeded or hit an error, and the response data often says why.
Suppose the saved request is correct, but the receiving system was down. Inspect that request with your developer, restore the receiving system, and confirm it can accept the delivery. That's our recovery example. If the request itself has the wrong address, headers or data, correct the source for future deliveries and work with your developer on that failed request. The docs don't say whether Replay uses original or current settings, so don't assume it picks up your edits.
Now, a word of caution, and this is general good practice rather than an Ontraport setting. A failed response doesn't always mean nothing happened at the other end. So before you resend, check the other system. If a request already registered the contact or created the record, don't replay it. Only replay the requests that truly didn't go through, and try one first.
To replay, select one or more requests in Webhook Logs, click the Replay action, and confirm. You don't need to rebuild the webhook or send it by hand. Each replay creates a new log entry, with the type Replay.
Finally, find that Replay entry in the log and check its response code. Then look in the other system to make sure the data arrived once, the way you expected.
One more setting to know. In each webhook's advanced settings, you can limit how many requests it sends per minute, up to a hundred and eighty, and how many times it retries, up to ten. More retries can slow down processing, so set this with your developer.
So: get failure emails, read the log to find out why, restore a failed receiving system, replay only what truly didn't go through, and confirm the result. Next up: contact tracking in Ontraport.