Webhooks Overview

Webhook Overview

A webhook sends account activity to a URL you control, so your own systems can react to what's happening in Ambassador. There are two places you can set one up, and they're built for different jobs. Notifications cover the standard cases. Automations cover everything else.

	Notifications	Automations
Best for	Standard events, minimal setup	Custom triggers, conditions, and timing
Triggers	One of our standard notification events	Whatever you build the Automation to listen for
Payload	Our standard payload for that event	Shaped by the Automation you build
Timing	Immediate, daily, or weekly	Wherever you place it in the flow

Both approaches can live side by side, and plenty of accounts do exactly that: a standard notification webhook for everyday visibility, plus a handful of Automation webhooks for the workflows that need custom logic.

Standard webhooks from Notifications

Setting up a webhook here is the quickest path. You pick an event, point it at a URL, and we send our standard payload for that event on your chosen frequency. Nothing to build, nothing to configure beyond the destination.

This is the right choice when the event you care about is on the list and the standard output has what your system needs.

You'll set these up at Settings → Notifications by creating a notification channel with the type set to Webhook. For the full walk-through, including frequency options and how to test the channel once it's saved, see Setting Up Notifications and Alerts.

You can also send your system error digest to a webhook. That's a separate setting on the same page, and it's covered in the same article.

Custom webhooks from Automations

If you need more control, you can also send a webhook as an outcome inside an Automation. Because you're building the Automation, you decide what triggers the webhook and what conditions have to be true first, which opens up cases the standard notification events don't cover.

Reach for an Automation when you want to:

Fire a webhook on a trigger or a combination of conditions that isn't one of the standard notification events
Send only when specific criteria are met, rather than on every occurrence of an event
Pair the webhook with other actions in the same flow, like sending an email or updating a contact
Tailor the timing to a step in a contact's journey

Verifying webhook payloads

However you're sending a webhook, you can verify that incoming payloads really came from us:

Signature verification supports HMAC (sha256 or sha512) and JWT.
A unique webhook token is generated automatically.
The token is shown when you edit the configuration. Copy it and store it securely in the system that's receiving the payloads.

When a webhook isn't arriving

Start with your logs. Webhook delivery failures are recorded in your System Logs at Admin & Configuration → Logs & Audit, so that's the fastest way to tell the difference between "we never sent it" and "we sent it and something on the receiving end rejected it." Filter the source to webhooks and check the error message on any entry. See Using the Logs Page for more on filtering and exporting.

From there, a few things worth checking:

The destination URL is still correct and reachable from outside your network
The token stored in your receiving system still matches the one on the configuration
The channel is still enabled, or if the webhook comes from an Automation, that the Automation is still active
Your receiving endpoint is returning a success response, since repeated failures will keep showing up in your logs

If everything looks right on your end and payloads still aren't landing, reach out to your Customer Success Manager or our support team with a few timestamps from your System Logs and we'll dig in with you.