Webhooks - General Availability

In this release, Webhooks is generally available to Cornerstone customers and has improved throughput through additional infrastructure tiering for larger customers with higher volumes of learning assignment and completion events, plus more robust error handling capability.

Starter Guide

Click here to download the Webhooks Starter Guide.

What are Webhooks?

Webhooks are an HTTP-enabled feature that enables customers to integrate deeper into the Cornerstone ecosystem by enabling near real-time access to critical business event data.

Why use Webhooks?

Webhooks provides the following:

Event-driven notifications to drive more timely business process execution
Full event data payloads that do not require multiple API calls
Asynchronous processing of data
Decreased implementation complexity

New Features for the July '24 Release

The following key features are added with this release:

Infrastructure tiering to make increased throughput available to all customers
Improved Observability with Status subscription alerts
24/7 Support available for all Cornerstone Webhooks customers

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How does this relate to current functionality?

Users should see a reduced need to call throttled APIs such as the Reporting API, Employee API, and Training API as they adopt the corresponding Webhooks. Webhooks can replace API calls for Employee, Transcript, and Training information or supplement existing API calls to shorten the time it takes to receive notifications on changes to any of this information.

Infrastructure Tiers

Webhook data throughput depends on Endpoint call response time and the infrastructure tiering of the Webhook. The following table shows the available tiers and how they compare:

Tier	Starter	Small	Medium	Large
Records Per Second (Peak Throughput)	1	10	100	1000
Per minute sustained rate	60	600	6,000	60,000
Failed Message Retry Attempts	1	10	20	50
Retention Period	3 days	3 days	3 days	3 days
Max Unique Webhooks	10	20	50	100
Parallelism /Partitions	1	1	2	4
Max Batch size (Record Container)	10	100	500	1000

Available Alerts

Alerts are a Webhook event category that allows end users to set up Webhooks to alert and monitor their other Webhooks, such as training or skills.

The following alerts are now available:

Failed - This alert is triggered when the Webhook moves into a failed state. Generally, this would occur because of an issue with the customer's Endpoint that needs to be updated. Once resolved, the customer can restart the Webhook.
ReducedCapacity - This alert is based on the customer's tiering and is triggered when one or more Webhook sessions are not running for 30 minutes.
LaggingOver10Seconds - This alert is triggered when the records' average lag time is more than 10 seconds over 30 minutes.
LaggingOver10Minutes - This alert is triggered when the records' average lag time is more than 10 minutes over 30 minutes.
LaggingOver1Hour - This alert is triggered when the records' average lag time is more than 1 hour over 30 minutes.
LaggingOver1Day - This alert is triggered when the records' average lag time is more than 1 day over 30 minutes.
NoHeartbeat - Webhooks produce a heartbeat every 5 minutes to inform consumers that it is running. This alert is triggered when there has been no heartbeat for 30 minutes or more. This alert is triggered repeatedly until action is taken. When the NoHeartbeat alert is triggered, Cornerstone automatically restarts the Webhook.

Note: Various factors can cause lag time, but it is common during the start of a new Webhook when there are many events to be processed in the backlog.

Implementation

Webhooks can be enabled for all customers except those on swimlanes SL4 and SL5.

To enable Webhooks in Stage environments, contact Global Customer Support.

To enable Webhooks in Production environments, contact your account executive to purchase Webhooks. Once purchased, contact Global Customer Support to enable Webhooks.

When Webhooks are enabled, the Edge Endpoints - Create Secret, Edge Endpoints - Manage, Edge Endpoints - View Secret, Edge Endpoints - View, Edge Webhooks - Manage, Edge Webhooks - Start/Stop, and Edge Webhooks - View permissions are automatically granted to the default System Administrator role. Administrators must grant this permission with the appropriate constraints to other roles, if necessary.

Set up a Webhook

To set up a Webhook, you must first create an Endpoint to link your hosted URL and the Webhook.

To create a Webhook endpoint, go to Admin > Tools > Edge > Endpoints and select Create Endpoint.

Then, create a Webhook to begin publishing events to your Endpoint.

To create a Webhook, go to Admin > Tools > Edge > Webhooks and select Create Webhook.

Permissions

The following existing permissions apply to this functionality:

PERMISSION NAME

PERMISSION DESCRIPTION