Implement Webhook vs. Polling Triggers for Message Intake
Explore the differences between webhook and polling triggers in support intake workflows. Understand their operational tradeoffs, normalization requirements, debugging methods, and how to select triggers based on latency, failure visibility, and backfill needs.
A support intake workflow often has one hard requirement. Triage needs to start within a few minutes without losing messages. We touched briefly on the trigger-versus-webhook distinction earlier as a near-neighbor trap; here we go deeper, since intake is where that choice matters most. Two trigger strategies meet that requirement in different ways. A polling trigger asks the source system for new items on a schedule, so work starts on the next check and may arrive in batches. A webhook trigger starts a run when the source system sends an HTTP request to an endpoint, so work starts as soon as the sender pushes the event. Beyond picking a strategy, we'll also normalize what each trigger produces and learn to debug each one from its own kind of evidence.
Those behaviors force tradeoffs that show up in operations, not theory. Latency changes because schedules wait and webhooks do not. Setup complexity changes because a webhook needs a reachable endpoint and a sender configuration. Failure visibility changes because polling failures appear as the automation failing to fetch, while webhook failures appear as the sender failing to deliver. Replay and backfill ...