Glossary
Webhook vs Polling
Webhooks push events to your endpoint when they happen; polling pulls state on a schedule. Webhooks are real-time but harder to debug.
Polling: your service asks the provider 'anything new?' on a schedule. Simple to build, deterministic to debug, but wastes requests when nothing changed and adds latency proportional to the poll interval.
Webhooks: the provider POSTs to your endpoint when something happens. Real-time and efficient — but introduces failure modes polling avoids: signature verification, idempotency, retry storms, missed deliveries when your endpoint is down.
Modern stack pattern: webhooks for low-latency notifications, periodic reconciliation (poll once an hour) as a safety net to catch any webhooks that were lost or never delivered.
How HookSense helps
Webhook inspection (HookSense) gives you the polling-grade observability that webhook-based architectures are missing — see every event, replay any of them, search across history.
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