Missing Webhook Troubleshooting

When an expected webhook is missing, do not assume the provider never emitted it. Find where evidence disappeared in the delivery chain.

Symptom

Provider state changed while local state stayed stale, a confirmation/cancellation/refund event is absent, or polling finds new provider state without a corresponding webhook event.

Possible causes

No provider event, wrong callback URL, DNS/TLS/network failure, signature rejection, ingress timeout, queue failure, event-processing failure, or incorrect deduplication.

Diagnosis

Check provider delivery logs, ingress access logs, signature failures, queue/topic presence, dead-letter queues, event-store versus materialized-state drift, and finally authoritative provider status.

Recovery

Reconcile local state from authoritative lookup. Replay provider events when supported; otherwise record reconciliation evidence rather than inventing a fake provider event.

Prevention

Use webhook health monitoring, retry-safe ingress, durable queues, dead-letter handling, reconciliation fallback, delivery smoke tests and callback-configuration audits.

Observability

Track delivery volume, ingress 4xx/5xx, signature failures, queue lag, DLQ size, provider/local state drift and missing-webhook detections.