Notification Channels: Real-Time Webhook Alerts

Why Webhook Alerting Matters

Webhooks are the backbone of modern application integrations. They power everything from payment confirmations to deployment pipelines to customer onboarding flows. When a webhook fails to deliver, the downstream effects can cascade quickly:

• Payment confirmations never reach your fulfillment system
• GitHub deployments stall without triggering your CI/CD pipeline
• Customer sign-ups fail to sync to your CRM

The challenge? Webhook failures often happen silently. Without proper monitoring, you might not discover a broken integration until a customer reports it - or worse, until you notice missing revenue.

Hookbase notification channels solve this by providing proactive, real-time webhook monitoring that alerts your team the moment issues occur.

Meet the Notification Channel Types

We have built support for the platforms your team already uses, with native formatting for each:

Slack

Send rich Block Kit messages directly to your Slack channels. Perfect for team alerts where you want context-rich notifications with color-coded status, structured data fields, and quick links to your Hookbase dashboard.

Microsoft Teams

Enterprise teams using Microsoft 365 can receive beautifully formatted Adaptive Cards. These notifications include all the relevant details about failures and recoveries, formatted specifically for Teams' card system.

Discord

Developer communities and teams using Discord can receive embedded messages with color-coded status indicators. Great for open-source projects, gaming companies, and developer-focused teams who live in Discord.

PagerDuty

For mission-critical webhooks, PagerDuty integration ensures the right people get paged. Our integration uses PagerDuty's Events API v2 with:

• Automatic deduplication: Multiple failures for the same route create a single incident
• Auto-resolve on recovery: When your route starts succeeding again, the incident automatically resolves
• Severity mapping: Circuit breaker events are marked as "critical", regular failures as "error"

Email

Sometimes you need notifications to reach people who are not constantly monitoring chat. Email channels support multiple recipients and deliver clear, formatted notifications with all the context your on-call team needs.

Custom Webhooks

For teams with existing monitoring infrastructure, custom webhook channels let you POST notifications to any HTTP endpoint. You can include custom headers, use your own authentication, and optionally secure the payload with HMAC-SHA256 signing.

Setting Up Your First Notification Channel

Getting started takes just a few minutes. Here is how to set up the most common configurations.

Slack Channel Setup

First, create an Incoming Webhook in your Slack workspace, then configure it in Hookbase:

curl -X POST "https://api.hookbase.app/api/organizations/{orgId}/notification-channels" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer {token}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Engineering Alerts",
    "type": "slack",
    "config": {
      "webhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/T00000000/B00000000/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
    }
  }'

PagerDuty Channel Setup

For on-call alerting, connect to PagerDuty with your integration key:

curl -X POST "https://api.hookbase.app/api/organizations/{orgId}/notification-channels" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer {token}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "On-Call Paging",
    "type": "pagerduty",
    "config": {
      "routingKey": "your-32-character-integration-key",
      "severity": "error",
      "customService": "Hookbase Webhooks"
    }
  }'

The PagerDuty integration automatically handles incident lifecycle management - failures trigger incidents, and successful recoveries resolve them.

Custom Webhook with HMAC Signing

For integration with your own monitoring systems, set up a secure custom webhook:

curl -X POST "https://api.hookbase.app/api/organizations/{orgId}/notification-channels" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer {token}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Internal Monitoring",
    "type": "webhook",
    "config": {
      "url": "https://your-monitoring.internal/hookbase-alerts",
      "method": "POST",
      "headers": {
        "Content-Type": "application/json",
        "X-Source": "hookbase"
      },
      "hmacSecret": "your-secret-for-signature-verification"
    }
  }'

The HMAC signature is sent in the X-Hookbase-Signature header, allowing you to verify that notifications genuinely came from Hookbase.

Linking Channels to Routes

Notification channels become active when you link them to specific routes. This granular approach means you can:

• Send payment webhook failures to PagerDuty
• Route development webhook issues to a Slack channel
• Email the ops team about any circuit breaker events

Link a channel to a route with your preferred triggers:

curl -X POST "https://api.hookbase.app/api/organizations/{orgId}/notification-channels/{channelId}/routes" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer {token}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "routeId": "{routeId}",
    "notifyOnFailure": true,
    "notifyOnRecovery": true,
    "notifyOnCircuitOpen": true
  }'

Available Notification Triggers

| Trigger | When It Fires | |---------|---------------| | notifyOnFailure | Consecutive delivery failures exceed the threshold | | notifyOnRecovery | A failing route starts succeeding again | | notifyOnCircuitOpen | Circuit breaker trips, halting deliveries |

Recovery notifications are especially valuable - they tell you when an issue has been resolved without requiring manual checking.

Test Before You Need It

Every notification channel includes a test endpoint. Before relying on a channel for production alerting, verify it works:

curl -X POST "https://api.hookbase.app/api/organizations/{orgId}/notification-channels/{channelId}/test" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer {token}"

You can also test channels directly from the dashboard under Settings > Notifications.

Best Practices for Webhook Alerting

Based on patterns we have seen across thousands of webhook integrations, here are our recommendations:

1. Set up alerting before you need it. The worst time to configure notifications is during an incident. Get your channels working during normal operations.

2. Use multiple channels for critical routes. Payment webhooks might warrant both Slack (for visibility) and PagerDuty (for on-call escalation).

3. Enable recovery notifications. Knowing when an issue resolves is just as important as knowing when it starts. It saves your team from unnecessary investigation.

4. Match channel types to urgency levels. Discord for development environments, PagerDuty for production payment flows, email for weekly summary digests.

5. Avoid alert fatigue. Be selective about which triggers you enable. If every minor hiccup pages someone, the truly critical alerts get lost in the noise.

What Gets Included in Notifications

Every notification includes the context your team needs to respond quickly:

• Route name and ID: Which integration is affected
• Source and destination details: Where the webhook came from and where it was going
• Failure count: How many consecutive failures occurred
• Last error message: What went wrong
• Dashboard link: One click to investigate in Hookbase

For PagerDuty, we include structured custom details that integrate with your runbooks and incident management workflows.

Available Now

Notification channels are available today for all Hookbase plans. Free tier users can create one notification channel, while paid plans include unlimited channels.

To get started:

1. Log in to your Hookbase dashboard
2. Navigate to Settings > Notifications
3. Click Add Channel and choose your preferred type
4. Configure the channel and link it to your routes

If you are new to Hookbase, sign up for free and start routing webhooks with confidence knowing you will be the first to know if anything goes wrong.

What Is Next

We are already working on additional notification enhancements, including:

• Scheduled digest notifications for aggregate failure summaries
• Custom notification templates
• Webhook replay triggers from notification actions

Have feedback on notification channels or ideas for what we should build next? Reach out to us on Twitter or drop us a line at [email protected].