Webhook monitoring means automatically reading the delivery logs that Stripe, Shopify, and GitHub maintain for every webhook event — and alerting you within minutes when a delivery fails. Without active monitoring, failed webhooks go undetected for hours or days because platforms retry silently before notifying you.

Webhook Monitoring: How to Detect Delivery Failures Within Minutes

Last updated: May 20, 2026

A webhook fails. Your invoice.payment_failed handler never runs. Stripe retries for 72 hours without alerting you. By the time you find out, customer accounts have drifted from reality for three days.

Webhook monitoring closes this gap by actively watching delivery logs and alerting on failures in near real-time — instead of waiting for platforms to exhaust their retries and email you last.

What Is Webhook Monitoring?

Stripe, Shopify, and GitHub each maintain a delivery log for every webhook event they attempt to send. Each log entry records the event type, timestamp, HTTP response code your endpoint returned, response body, and delivery status (succeeded or failed).

Webhook monitoring is the practice of reading these delivery logs automatically — polling them every few minutes — and triggering an alert the moment a failure appears. Rather than waiting for a customer to report a broken feature, you find out within 5 minutes of the first failed delivery attempt.

Why Do Webhooks Fail Without Alerting You?

Each platform has its own retry behavior before notifying you:

• Stripe — retries up to 11 times over 72 hours on exponential backoff. You receive an email only after the 11th attempt fails. See: How to Know When a Stripe Webhook Fails.
• Shopify — retries 19 times over 48 hours with no notification during or after. After 19 failures, Shopify deletes the webhook subscription without telling you. See: Why Shopify Webhooks Fail Silently.
• GitHub — does not retry at all and does not send any failure notification. See: GitHub Webhook Delivery Logs.

In all three cases, the failure is logged immediately — but the alert isn't. Webhook monitoring bridges that gap.

How to Set Up Webhook Monitoring in 4 Steps

1. Connect your platforms via read-only OAuth. Authorize Webhook Guardian to read delivery logs from Stripe, Shopify, or GitHub. No write access is requested. Takes under 60 seconds per platform.
2. Configure your alert channel. Enter your Slack webhook URL or confirm your email. Webhook Guardian will send alerts to your chosen channel immediately on detecting a failure.
3. Webhook Guardian polls delivery logs every 5 minutes. Once connected, polling runs automatically. No further configuration is required.
4. Receive an alert when a failure is detected. The alert includes the event type, error code, retry count, payload preview, and a one-click replay link — everything you need to diagnose and recover without opening a dashboard.

What Does a Webhook Monitoring Alert Look Like?

When Webhook Guardian detects a failed delivery, the Slack alert includes:

• Platform — Stripe, Shopify, or GitHub
• Event type — e.g. invoice.payment_failed or orders/paid
• Error code — the HTTP status your endpoint returned (or "timeout" if no response)
• Retry count — how many times the platform has already retried
• Payload preview — first 500 characters of the event payload
• One-click replay — a button to re-trigger the delivery attempt directly from the alert
• Timestamp — when the failure occurred, not when we detected it

Which Webhook Events Are Most Critical to Monitor?

Not all webhook events carry the same risk when missed. The highest-impact events to monitor:

• Stripe — invoice.payment_failed, customer.subscription.deleted, checkout.session.completed, charge.refunded
• Shopify — orders/paid, orders/fulfilled, customers/create, app/uninstalled, inventory_levels/update
• GitHub — push (CI triggers), pull_request, workflow_run, deployment

Webhook Monitoring vs Manual Log Checking

Webhook Monitoring by Platform

Read the platform-specific guides for webhook failure detection:

• Stripe webhook monitoring — connect via Stripe Connect, detect failures within 5 minutes
• Shopify webhook monitoring — detect failures before Shopify deletes your subscription
• GitHub webhook monitoring — catch CI and deployment failures GitHub never alerts you about

FAQ: Webhook Monitoring

Start monitoring your webhooks in 2 minutes. Start free for 14 days — connect Stripe, Shopify, or GitHub via read-only OAuth and get alerted within 5 minutes of the first failed delivery.