Introducing Custom Webhooks

We're excited to share that with Custom Webhooks, you will be able to spin up any 3rd party webhook-trigger on Paragon, across both existing connectors and even custom integrations!

Demo of Custom Webhooks

Every 3rd party service has their own implementation around webhooks, which is why we support multiple ways to create Custom Webhooks, including:

1. Programmatic Webhooks: If supported by the 3rd party service, you can create and delete webhooks programmatically.

2. Manual Webhooks: Depending on the 3rd party service, either your developer, or your end-users, will create a webhook in the 3rd party app with a dynamically generated Webhook Target URL in Paragon.

Here’s a demo I put together walking through the Custom Webhooks creation flow:

Platform extensibility

At Paragon our belief is that to provide the best developer experience, extensibility needs to be built into every part of our platform, and Custom Webhooks is the latest edition to our suite of extensibility features.

This comes at a time when we are seeing a spike in demand for access to updated 3rd party data in real-time, especially with Generative AI companies building RAG pipelines where real-time ingestion of contextual data is critical.

Supporting every 3rd party webhook

Over the years, we’ve been consistently adding support for new webhook triggers to our pre-built connectors.

And now, you can leverage our webhook-triggers infrastructure to spin up your own Custom Webhook triggers with any 3rd party webhook API!

In the same way that the Integration Request Step makes our integration actions much more extensible, Custom Webhooks makes it easy to set up a re-usable Webhook Triggers in Paragon as well.

Not only that, this makes the Custom Integration Builder much more feature complete, as you can now define 3rd party webhook triggers from these custom integrations.

What’s happening under the hood

There are many challenges with webhooks that had to be addressed when building Custom Webhooks, even beyond the varying implementations from above.

1. Auth for creation/deletion: To programmatically setup or teardown webhook subscriptions via the 3rd party API, you’ll need to ensure your users’ access tokens are refreshed. As with every other feature on Paragon, whether it’s a Proxy API request or a Custom Integration, Custom Webhooks relies on the same managed authentication service so you won’t need to deal with the complexities of auth.
   
   

   

   
   

   

2. Lifecycle Management: It is computationally intensive to maintain webhook listeners across dozens of integrations for each of your customers/tenants. With Custom Webhooks you’ll offload all of that work to Paragon’s serverless infrastructure, which includes tearing down webhooks programmatically when a Connected User uninstalls the integration.
   
   

3. Security: Security is also a huge challenge with webhooks because your webhook listeners may be susceptible to unauthorized requests if the endpoint is exposed. To prevent that, you’ll need to implement handshakes to validate the authenticity of the incoming webhook payload. With Custom Webhooks, you can easily specify the webhook secret and hashing algorithms that are required to generate the necessary HMAC (Hash-based Message Authentication Code) for each webhook.
   
   

   

   
   

4. Scalability: What happens if your user suddenly uploads 1M records to the third-party service, which subsequently triggers 1M payloads to your listener? Or if you have thousands of customers all triggering webhook events concurrently? Unless your infrastructure can handle the scale, it can overload your infrastructure (this happened to CrystalKnows before they started using Paragon). Luckily, Custom Webhooks relies on Paragon’s Workflow Engine, which has a long-running queue to receive and process webhook data at any scale.

Get started with Custom Webhooks

For existing users - if you want to be onboarded into the beta, fill out this form here. you’ll soon see a new Triggers tab in every integration’s configuration page for each integration, where you can go through and create new re-usable Triggers for the integration.

If you're new to Paragon, we'd love to walk you through the platform and Custom Webhooks within the context of your integration roadmap! You can find some time for a personalized demo here.