Webhook Subscription

Overview

Webhook Subscription is a stored registration that tells a provider which endpoint, event types, account scope, and delivery settings should receive webhook notifications. It is configuration for future delivery, not an individual webhook event and not proof that the endpoint successfully processed any event.

The principal risks include events sent to an obsolete or attacker-controlled endpoint, overbroad event access, secret exposure, duplicate subscriptions, disabled endpoints remaining active, and environment mix-ups. A receiver should treat transport acknowledgement and successful downstream processing as separate states for Webhook Subscription.

A production implementation should authenticate subscription changes, validate endpoint ownership, restrict event scope, store signing configuration, support rotation and disablement, expose status, and test delivery before production use. Replay of Webhook Subscription should preserve original identifiers and timestamps so historical processing cannot masquerade as a new event.

Useful measures include active subscriptions, delivery success by subscription, disabled or failing endpoints, secret age, duplicate registrations, and time to remove obsolete destinations. Webhook Subscription is closely connected to Webhook Consumer, Webhook Acknowledgement, and Payload Signature. The Webhook Subscription path should preserve ordering and duplicate evidence so delayed delivery cannot silently overwrite a newer state.

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

Business actions triggered by Webhook Subscription should be idempotent and should verify the current object state before fulfillment or accounting updates. Monitoring for Webhook Subscription should track delivery age, signature failures, duplicate rate, retry exhaustion, and unresolved business events.