Data Webhook Management

Overview#

A financial crime unit maintains a real-time alert feed that notifies partner compliance teams whenever a monitored entity triggers a new match. If the webhook endpoint at one partner goes down for forty minutes during a maintenance window, those alerts cannot simply be dropped. They need to be queued, retried with appropriate backoff, and delivered when the endpoint recovers, without the sending system needing manual intervention and without the event queue growing unbounded. Meanwhile, six other partner endpoints that are healthy should not be affected by the one that is temporarily unavailable.

The Argus Webhook Management module handles reliable, circuit-protected HTTP event delivery at scale. It manages the complete webhook lifecycle: creation, security configuration, testing, monitoring, delivery guarantees, and event replay. Circuit breakers isolate failing endpoints automatically so a single unhealthy consumer cannot affect delivery to others. For intelligence agencies, financial crime units, law enforcement, and healthcare data controllers, this is the mechanism that keeps external partners synchronised with platform events in real time without manual coordination or polling-based integrations.

Key Features#

• Reliable Event Delivery: Achieve high delivery success rates through automatic retry logic with exponential backoff. Events reach their destinations even during transient endpoint failures, without manual intervention.
• Flexible Event Filtering: Subscribe to specific event types and apply fine-grained filters so endpoints receive only the events they need. Filtering reduces noise at the consumer and unnecessary processing at the sender.
• Circuit Breaker Protection: Automatically detect failing endpoints and temporarily suspend delivery to prevent cascading failures and resource exhaustion. Delivery resumes automatically when the endpoint recovers, verified by health checks.
• Delivery Guarantees: Configure at-least-once delivery with deduplication support, ordered delivery for sequential events, or batch delivery for high-volume scenarios. Guarantee mode is set per webhook endpoint based on consumer requirements.
• Webhook Security: Protect webhook communications with HMAC signature verification, mutual TLS, IP allowlisting, and custom authentication headers. Consumers can verify that payloads genuinely originated from the platform.
• Real-Time Monitoring: Track delivery success rates, response times, retry patterns, and circuit breaker status through live dashboards and configurable alerts. Delivery health is visible without querying delivery logs manually.
• Webhook Testing: Validate endpoints with connectivity tests, sample event delivery, and latency measurements before activating production webhooks. Problems are caught in testing rather than discovered through missed production deliveries.
• Event Replay: Replay historical events to recover from outages or onboard new subscribers without waiting for new events. A consumer that was offline for two hours can catch up on what it missed.
• Payload Customisation: Format event data using payload templates to match each subscriber's expected structure. Different consumers can receive the same underlying event in different formats.
• Lifecycle Management: Manage the full webhook lifecycle from creation through configuration, testing, monitoring, and deactivation with complete audit trails. Every change to a webhook configuration is recorded.

Use Cases#

• Real-Time Partner Notification: Keep partner compliance teams, downstream SIEM systems, and external case management tools synchronised by delivering change events in real time, without the latency and overhead of polling-based integrations.
• Third-Party Alerting: Notify external partners or downstream applications when significant events occur, such as a monitored entity triggering a new match, a case status changing, or a threshold being exceeded.
• Event-Driven Workflow Triggers: Trigger automated processes in external systems in response to platform events. A new match triggers a compliance workflow; a case escalation triggers a notification chain in a third-party system.
• Multi-Consumer Event Distribution: Distribute events to multiple subscribers simultaneously, each with their own filtering rules and payload format, from a single event source. Adding a new consumer does not require changes to the producing system.
• Audit and Compliance Monitoring: Deliver audit events to compliance monitoring systems in real time with guaranteed delivery and complete delivery tracking. Every event dispatched and every acknowledgement received is recorded for regulatory documentation.

Integration#

The Data Webhook Management module connects with all major event sources within the Argus platform and delivers events to any HTTP-accessible endpoint. Webhook configuration, delivery records, and audit trails are stored in PostgreSQL with organisation scoping. The module integrates with the platform's authentication infrastructure for security policy enforcement and with the monitoring system for operational alerting on delivery health degradation.

Open Standards#

• HMAC-SHA256 (RFC 2104 / FIPS 180-4): Every outbound webhook payload is signed using HMAC with SHA-256; the resulting signature is attached as X-Argus-Signature: sha256=<hex> so consumers can cryptographically verify that payloads originated from the platform.
• HTTP Semantics (RFC 9110): Outbound delivery uses standard HTTP POST with status code semantics to determine success or failure, and the retry-with-exponential-backoff logic is driven entirely by non-2xx HTTP responses.
• JSON (RFC 8259): All webhook payloads are serialised as JSON with application/json content type; the event envelope carries id, event, timestamp, and data fields as specified by the standard.
• TLS 1.2/1.3 (RFC 8446): All outbound delivery is transmitted over HTTPS, with mutual TLS available as an additional option for authenticating webhook consumer endpoints.
• OAuth 2.0 (RFC 6749): The platform authentication infrastructure that enforces webhook security policy and governs API access is built on OAuth 2.0 bearer tokens.
• CloudEvents 1.0 (CNCF): Internal platform events are wrapped in CloudEvents 1.0 envelopes before being routed to the webhook dispatcher, providing a consistent, interoperable event schema across producers and consumers.
• UUID (RFC 4122): Each subscription and delivery attempt is assigned a UUID v4 identifier, enabling idempotent deduplication, audit trail correlation, and replay without ambiguity.

Last Reviewed: 2026-02-09 Last Updated: 2026-04-14