Initial testing feedback

I did some quick testing with the BETA Webhooks back in February - but wanted to mirror the information here.

Things I like:

  • The interface is clean and straightforward
  • The replay-ability over missed events, or if the request was not delivered is very nice. Much more transparent than sorting logs of the Shotgun Event Daemon for missed EventLogEntries.
  • The sorting / listing of events which match criteria is also really nice.
  • The secret token / HMAC SHA1 hashing for safety, this is a very necessary feature. Much appreciated.
  • The status display and filtering looks like it’s going to be nice.
  • The Webhooks data payload display is very nice for debugging purposes.

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Errors / Suggestions:

  • When creating a webhook I would like the option to set an e-mail or some sort of alert which can report when a webhook is Unstable / Failing.
  • A webhook URL “Test Connection” button
  • On the Webhook creation form, I see that you can set select Projects, or all Projects, but what about excluding from a specific project or few projects. - When a new project is created, I do not want to have to go through and update all existing webhooks to now include the new project.
  • Could be worth expanding this to allow for some conditions to be met before triggering an event.
  • Filters on the Deliveries section could be more extended / customized
  • The “Redeliver Selected” button is not clearly “disabled” for a “Failed” webhook - Suggesting a different color or option or tooltip to indicate why it’s not active. - Currently it just dims the color
  • Oh… Just noticed, for a “Failed” webhook - clicking the “|| Disable” button in the top-right actually re-enabled the webhook.

  • ** This is probably a failure to update the button state, I had not selected a different webhook or reloaded the page between the Webhook being “Active” and it’s transition to “Failed”


Additional note - doing a quick show-and-tell on the functionality of the webhooks with a coworker.

First thing: For past events which I want to re-deliver ‘selected’ - I would like to have a “Select all” checkbox to allow selection of… all “status” - failed deliveries to re-deliver together.

I marked a number of previously delivered events to re-deliver and was ‘quickly’ working with the interface, when we noticed that deliveries were no longer going to the request catcher. - The interface was seemingly non-responsive and did not process events or even put new triggered events on the list.

I think an improvement to the system would be to have a “Pending delivery” status for events which have not been picked up by the Shotgun server to send the request through to the URL yet.

We sat staring at the non-responsive interface and concluded after ~5 minutes that something was either bogged down, or not working on the shotgun side. - There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the setup, URL, etc.
I just happen to have the request catcher monitor open and after another ~2 minutes a number of webhook POST requests came in altogether.

For our testing just now, it was with ~3 webhooks, handling a simple event.
I am concerned about how well this will scale when there will be hundreds of events happening simultaneously. - What are the throughput limitations?

We’re looking forward to the day when we can rely on this feature as a stable, functional solution to fully replace the Shotgun Event Daemons we have running currently.

Hope this feedback helps improve the workflow!
Cheers,
David

Thanks for the feedback David!

It’s good to see other dabbling with WebHooks. Some great feedback here. We also noticed some sever latency with Webhooks. We have a single broker configured in AWS Lambda that services Actions and Webhook events. I have also noticed that SG’s service in the middle impacts performance. Actions call our lambda directly and don’t suffer from the same bottle neck. Furthermore, Webhooks really need a batching operation that groups Webhooks together based on a time threshold to reduce compute time and cold starts. Hoping more users jump in on these topics and encourage SG to refine Webhooks a bit more.

Romey