Webhook Deduplication

Overview

Webhook Deduplication identifies repeated webhook deliveries or semantically repeated events and prevents repeated business processing. It differs from webhook replay because replay intentionally resends an event, while deduplication decides whether processing should create a new effect. Replay of Webhook Deduplication should preserve original identifiers and timestamps so historical processing cannot masquerade as a new event.

The main risks include false duplicates suppressing valid updates, insufficient retention, race conditions, provider event ID reuse, and duplicate downstream actions. It commonly uses event IDs, object identifiers, event types, payload hashes, or provider delivery IDs.

In production, teams should define ownership and apply durable event-key store, atomic insert with processing, provider-specific identity rules, retention aligned with retries, and audit logging. A receiver should treat transport acknowledgement and successful downstream processing as separate states for Webhook Deduplication.

Useful measures include deduplication hit rate, false-positive count, duplicate side-effect count, and deduplication lookup latency. Webhook Deduplication is closely connected to Duplicate Webhook, Request Deduplication, and Webhook Replay. A Webhook Deduplication handler should acknowledge only after durable receipt when the provider’s retry contract depends on the response.

For Webhook Deduplication, the event identifier, signature result, delivery attempt, and resulting business state should remain connected throughout processing. The Webhook Deduplication path should preserve ordering and duplicate evidence so delayed delivery cannot silently overwrite a newer state.

Recovery for Webhook Deduplication should combine replay controls with an authoritative status check rather than trusting delivery history alone. Business actions triggered by Webhook Deduplication should be idempotent and should verify the current object state before fulfillment or accounting updates.