I once had six browser tabs open, all trying to answer the same question:
"What happened to this webhook?"
The provider insisted the event had been delivered successfully. My application logs showed nothing. The endpoint looked healthy. There were no alerts, no obvious errors, and yet users were reporting that actions simply weren't happening.
Like most developers, I started opening tabs.
First, the provider's dashboard.
Then my application logs.
Then my cloud logs.
Then the reverse proxy.
Then the database.
Then the queue.
Somewhere inside those six tabs was the answer, but finding it felt less like debugging software and more like solving a mystery.
Eventually, I figured it out. But what stayed with me wasn't the bug itself—it was how much work it took just to understand what had happened. As I built more SaaS products and integrated with more third-party services, I found myself repeating that exact process over and over again.
After a while, I stopped thinking of it as bad luck.
I started thinking of it as a tooling problem.
And that's where the idea for Hooktrace was born.
Webhooks Power More Software Than We Realize
Modern software runs on events.
When someone pays for a subscription, a webhook fires.
When a deployment finishes, another webhook fires.
When a customer signs up, updates their profile, places an order, or connects a third-party integration, another webhook fires.
Behind the scenes, thousands of these events are constantly moving between systems, quietly keeping modern applications in sync.
Most developers don't spend much time thinking about webhooks because, when everything works, they're wonderfully boring. One application sends an HTTP request to another, the receiving application processes it, and everyone moves on.
The trouble begins when something goes wrong.
Suddenly you're asking questions that should have simple answers.
Did the request actually reach my server?
Did my application reject it?
Was the webhook signature invalid?
Did the provider retry the event?
Did retries create duplicate records?
Did another downstream service timeout?
Or did the request simply disappear somewhere between two systems?
None of those questions are particularly difficult on their own.
The difficult part is that every answer lives somewhere different.
Part of the story lives inside the provider's dashboard.
Another part lives in your application logs.
Something else is hidden in cloud monitoring.
Your queue knows another piece.
Your database knows another.
By the time you've reconstructed what happened, you've often spent more time investigating the problem than actually fixing it.
That always felt backwards to me.
There are already some fantastic tools for working with webhooks, and I still use many of them today.
They let you inspect requests, replay events, expose localhost, and simulate webhook providers. They make local development dramatically easier.
But production introduces an entirely different set of questions.
You're no longer wondering whether a webhook works.
You're wondering why retry rates suddenly increased.
Why one endpoint keeps failing while another doesn't.
Why delivery latency doubled overnight.
Which customers are currently affected.
Whether your queue is quietly backing up.
Whether a provider changed something without you noticing.
Those aren't development problems anymore.
They're observability problems.
And that's where I felt there was a missing piece.
That's Why I'm Building Hooktrace
Hooktrace isn't another webhook testing tool.
It's an observability platform built specifically for webhook infrastructure.
The goal is simple.
Instead of opening six different dashboards to investigate a failed delivery, I want developers to open one.
Instead of manually stitching together request logs, retries, payloads, response codes, and latency, I want that timeline to already exist.
When something fails, developers shouldn't have to spend twenty minutes figuring out what happened before they can even begin fixing it.
They should immediately know:
- Why it failed
- When it failed
- Who it affected
- What they should do next
That's the experience I'm trying to build.
AI Should Help You Debug, Not Replace You
One area I'm particularly excited about is AI-assisted debugging.
Today, most debugging starts with reading logs until something finally clicks.
But imagine opening a failed webhook and immediately seeing an explanation like this:
Signature verification failed because your webhook secret no longer matches the provider's latest configuration.
Or:
The request exceeded the provider's timeout because a downstream database query blocked for 12 seconds.
Or:
This failure closely matches previous incidents. Replaying the event after updating authentication is likely to succeed.
AI shouldn't replace debugging.
It should eliminate the repetitive investigation that every developer has already performed dozens of times.
The goal isn't to think for developers.
The goal is simply to help them reach the root cause faster.
Building for Production Is the Interesting Part
Webhook infrastructure becomes surprisingly complicated once you move beyond local development.
Retries.
Dead-letter queues.
Idempotency.
Ordering guarantees.
High-volume event ingestion.
Multi-tenant systems.
Real-time streaming.
Long-term event storage.
Searching through millions of webhook deliveries.
None of these problems sound particularly exciting on paper.
But solving them well is exactly what makes infrastructure feel invisible.
Reliable infrastructure isn't flashy.
It's infrastructure you never have to think about because you trust it to work.
That's exactly what I want Hooktrace to become.
Why I'm Building in Public
One thing I've learned over the past few years is that developer tools become significantly better when they're shaped by developers.
Every failed webhook teaches something.
Every production incident exposes another edge case.
Every integration uncovers another missing feature.
Rather than waiting until Hooktrace feels "finished," I'd rather share the journey as it happens.
I'll be writing about architecture decisions, engineering trade-offs, implementation details, mistakes, redesigns, and everything I learn while building the platform.
Hopefully those lessons are useful, even if you never end up using Hooktrace.
Looking Ahead
Hooktrace is still in its early days.
Some ideas will evolve.
Some features will fail.
Others will emerge from conversations with developers who run into the same problems I have.
But the mission is simple.
I want webhook debugging to stop feeling like detective work.
Because the best infrastructure isn't infrastructure you constantly think about.
It's infrastructure you can trust without thinking about it at all.
If you've ever spent an afternoon asking yourself:
"What happened to this webhook?"
I'd genuinely love to hear your story.
There's a good chance you're describing exactly what Hooktrace should solve next.
Follow Along
🌐 Website: https://hooktrace.xyz
⭐ GitHub: https://github.com/hooktracehq/hooktrace
I'll be sharing regular engineering articles, architecture deep dives, implementation details, and behind-the-scenes progress as Hooktrace evolves.
If that sounds interesting, I'd love to have you along for the journey.
Thanks for reading.