Webhook Replay

Overview

Webhook Replay is the intentional redelivery or reprocessing of a previously recorded webhook event to recover from missed delivery, consumer failure, deployment defects, or corrected business logic. It differs from an automatic retry because replay is often initiated after the original retry schedule and may use stored event data or a provider replay tool.

The main risks include repeating irreversible side effects, replaying stale events out of order, using modified payloads, and overwhelming consumers. A receiver should treat transport acknowledgement and successful downstream processing as separate states for Webhook Replay.

In production, teams should define ownership and apply authorized replay controls, immutable source event, idempotent consumer, replay reason, scoped selection, rate limiting, and audit trail. The Webhook Replay path should preserve ordering and duplicate evidence so delayed delivery cannot silently overwrite a newer state.

Useful measures include replay success rate, duplicate suppression rate, events recovered, replay-induced exceptions, and recovery time. Webhook Replay is closely connected to Webhook Event Log, Webhook Deduplication, and Failed Webhook. Business actions triggered by Webhook Replay should be idempotent and should verify the current object state before fulfillment or accounting updates.

Replay of Webhook Replay should preserve original identifiers and timestamps so historical processing cannot masquerade as a new event. For Webhook Replay, the event identifier, signature result, delivery attempt, and resulting business state should remain connected throughout processing.

Recovery for Webhook Replay should combine replay controls with an authoritative status check rather than trusting delivery history alone. A Webhook Replay handler should acknowledge only after durable receipt when the provider’s retry contract depends on the response.