Checking Webhook call success

[Anonymous]

We are starting to Toast Notifications from Marketo to our product via API and am interested in any best practices around this and have several questions.

• We understand that we can not track deliverability / engagement on this, but does anyone have best practices for checking whether the API call was received successful? We thought about putting in a listening campaign trigger off webhook being called and an error type and response are added as constraints?
• We can use the notification templates from our notification system, but wanted to know the best way to create templates from within Marketo. Can we create templates in the Design Studio in the same way we would for edms or does this need to be added as html into the webhook each time?

Thanks

Tim

[Rachel_Noble]

For your first bullet point-

We do something similar. At the end of the webhook called campaign, we add a short wait step.

Then, we create a flow action with a choice "if member of smart list, send alert"

The smart list references "Webhook is called, error code is..."

It's not beautiful by any means but it gets the job done. It seems like the suggestion you laid out would work just as well.

Could also consider automated program status updates and include "webhook error" if it's something you want to track at the program level. This may be overkill, depending on your end goal.

Good luck!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

• We understand that we can not track deliverability / engagement on this, but does anyone have best practices for checking whether the API call was received successful? We thought about putting in a listening campaign trigger off webhook being called and an error type and response are added as constraints?

If you're concerned about API call accounting, I recommend using an API gateway such as Apigee.  You'll get reports on HTTP failures + error codes as well as performance/uptime trends. 

I wouldn't try to do this accounting using Marketo. It's just more load on your instance and there are always gaps when you ask a system to monitor itself!

• We can use the notification templates from our notification system, but wanted to know the best way to create templates from within Marketo. Can we create templates in the Design Studio in the same way we would for edms or does this need to be added as html into the webhook each time?

Webhook payload templates aren't integrated into Design Studio, if that's what you mean.  You could, I suppose, build a template in Design Studio, then use an intermediate API endpoint to merge pure JSON data with the template (fetching the template via REST API), then forward the final payload to the next endpoint.  Can't imagine this would be worth the time to build, though if you're in enough pain...