Tip of the Day from an Adobe Marketo Engage Champion and Community Advisor!

[Jon_Chen]

Adobe Marketo Engage Champion and Community Advisor @Darshil_Shah1 has a recurring post a LinkedIn which highlights unique Marketo tips that may help you with your programs. Check out a recent tip below on Marketo webhooks!

💡 Adobe Marketo Engage tip of the day 💡

Use a webhook aggregator service to reduce the execution time and the number of outbound calls from Marketo. 🔥

🔶 Marketo limits a maximum of 20 concurrent webhook connections at a time, meaning, at any point in time, there could only be a max of 20 outstanding webhook calls from an instance, any subsequent calls are made to wait until any of the existing calls complete and their response gets back to the Marketo.

🔷 This limitation of 20 concurrent webhook calls can pose a challenge in processing times for an instance with a lot of outbound webhook calls.

🔶 In order to optimize the webhook processing in such cases, it is recommended to use a webhook aggregator service. A webhook aggregator can split a single composite webhook call from Marketo into individual requests, call the respective downstream services, get the individual call's responses back, aggregate them and send them back to Marketo as one single response.

🔷 As you can clearly notice from above, Marketo doesn't have to call each service individually, it can just make a composite call to the aggregator service with all the required data, and offload the heavy lift of making calls to the individual services and getting back the responses. The execution time and the number of calls made by Marketo are greatly reduced using this.

If you have any questions or comments, please let @Darshil_Shah1 know in the comment section below!

If you’d like to see more, you can view all of Darshil’s tips on his LinkedIn profile, or look out for more of his tips on the Community!

[Luke_Wakefield]

Hey @Darshil_Shah1,

Hope you are well. Would this be different than webhook "throttling" since it's a third party tool connecting with Marketo? Is Marketo's throttling application just the limit of 20 concurrent webhook connections at a time? I'm in the process of understanding passing large amounts of data through webhooks in Marketo. 

Thanks,

Luke

[SanfordWhiteman]

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Hope you are well. Would this be different than webhook "throttling" since it's a third party tool connecting with Marketo?

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Not sure exactly what you’re asking.

A webhook aggregator can lessen the impact of the 20-connection limit by allowing multiple remote services to be contacted, for the same lead, in parallel — while only using 1 formal Call Webhook step in Marketo.

For example, say you have 3 webhooks that you run for every new lead.

One does email validation, one some kind of enrichment, the other sends to an analytics service. They each take a second or two to finish.

Because they do independent things, they can execute in parallel, which is what will happen if they’re run by different trigger campaigns. But then they’re using 3 of your 20 outbound connections, which at scale may become problematic.

On the contrary, if you use a webhook aggregator service, that aggregator can run all 3 in parallel, while Marketo, as far as it knows, is only calling 1 webhook. So you have 19 slots available for other leads to be processed at the same time.

But a webhook aggregator can’t help if you only ever execute one webhook per lead in a short period. You would need to have multiple active webhooks defined and/or contemplated for an aggregator to help.