Monitoring and Observability
How to Detect When Webhooks Stop Arriving
Some webhook failures are obvious. Others are worse: the events simply stop showing up, and nobody notices until business data goes out of sync.
A broken webhook endpoint usually leaves clues. You may see HTTP 500 responses, timeout errors, or repeated retries from the provider.
But there is another class of problem that is harder to catch: webhook events stop arriving entirely.
No retries. No errors. No visible outage. Just silence.
Why this problem is harder than normal webhook failures
When events stop arriving, the issue may not be inside your application at all. It could be caused by provider configuration changes, disabled endpoints, failed DNS, expired domains, routing mistakes, or infrastructure changes that nobody connected back to webhooks.
From your application's point of view, nothing is failing because nothing is arriving.
Common signs that webhook events have stopped
- No recent deliveries for an endpoint that normally receives regular traffic
- Business workflows quietly falling behind
- Missing subscription updates, order syncs, or account changes
- A sudden drop in webhook activity with no matching drop in real user activity
These signs usually appear before anyone checks the provider dashboard.
A practical way to detect silent webhook gaps
The most useful signal is not just whether an endpoint responds, but whether it is still seeing the level of activity you expect.
In practice, teams usually detect missing webhook traffic by combining:
- Health checks for the endpoint itself
- Historical logs of recent webhook activity
- Alerts when no activity is seen for an unusual period
This helps catch the situation where the endpoint is technically up, but real webhook deliveries have stopped.
What to check first when events go quiet
- Has the webhook endpoint URL changed?
- Was the provider endpoint disabled or rotated?
- Did DNS, TLS, or reverse proxy settings change?
- Did recent deployments affect routing or middleware?
- Has the provider stopped sending events because of repeated failures?
This checklist is usually more useful than staring at application logs and waiting for errors that may never appear.
Monitoring helps, but activity history matters too
Basic uptime monitoring cannot tell you that webhook traffic has disappeared. It can only tell you that the endpoint still responds.
To catch silent webhook gaps, engineers need visibility into both endpoint health and recent webhook activity patterns.
If you are already tracking retries and failures, this is the next problem worth watching for.