How Hookdeck's Observability Dashboard Cuts Webhook Incident Response Time

A user reports that their order didn't process. It happened Saturday at 11:42 PM. Your payment provider shows the event was sent. Your application shows no order was created. You have no idea what happened in between.

You start grepping logs. The log rotation ran at midnight. You find a partial entry — the request arrived, the handler started, and then nothing. You check your payment provider's dashboard. They show the delivery was attempted, the response was a timeout, and they retried at 12:12 AM. The retry shows a 200. Did that process? You check the orders table. One order, created Sunday at 12:12 AM, not Saturday at 11:42 PM. The customer saw no confirmation email for thirty minutes. Now they're asking if they were charged.

This is the standard webhook incident experience without good observability tooling. You are doing archaeology. Every piece of information lives in a different system. The answer exists — it is written somewhere in the logs, the provider's dashboard, and the database — but reconstructing it takes an hour of context-switching that should take two minutes.

Hookdeck fixed this. Read Hookdeck G2 reviews to see how teams describe incident response before and after adopting the platform. The Hookdeck documentation covers the delivery dashboard in full detail.

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Hookdeck's Observability: The Delivery Attempt Dashboard

Hookdeck captures every event at ingress and tracks every delivery attempt — showing you arrival time, attempt sequence, server response, latency, and retry status in a single view. This is not just logging — it is complete delivery lifecycle visibility that eliminates archaeology across four different systems. Logging shows you what happened on your side. Hookdeck shows you the complete delivery lifecycle — ingress, attempts, outcomes — in a single view that does not require you to correlate across four different systems.

The delivery attempt timeline is the critical feature. When an incident happens and a user reports "nothing processed," you open Hookdeck, find the event, and see the full history in order: arrived at 11:42 PM, delivered at 11:42 PM, your server returned 504, retried at 11:47 PM, your server returned 200. Total time from incident to answer: fifteen seconds. The archaeology is done.

The event routing layer integrates with the observability directly. When you have configured routing rules — send this event type to destination A, that event type to destination B — the delivery dashboard shows which destination each attempt was routed to, and why. Filter rules show you when an event was received but intentionally not forwarded. No more "did we even get that event?" conversations.

The Vercel middleware integration means that for Next.js teams, the Hookdeck connection is two lines of config. You import the middleware, add the connection string, and your API routes gain a durable event queue with full delivery observability without any infrastructure changes.

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Pipedream: Power for a Different Use Case

Pipedream is a workflow automation platform, not a delivery gateway — a distinction that matters before comparing it to Hookdeck on observability.

Pipedream is a workflow automation platform. You connect sources (GitHub events, Stripe webhooks, HTTP triggers, scheduled intervals) to workflows (sequences of steps that can call APIs, run code, transform data, send notifications). It is excellent at this job. If you need to receive a Stripe invoice.paid event and then create a row in Airtable, send a Slack message, and update a record in HubSpot — Pipedream is built for exactly that workflow.

The event inspector in Pipedream is purpose-built for workflow debugging. When a workflow step fails, you see the event that triggered it, the output of each step, and the error. The Advanced plan provides up to 8 auto-retries for failed workflow executions. For workflow-level failures — a step that errored, an API call that returned 500 — those retries are useful.

But Pipedream's pricing is credit-based. Credits are consumed per workflow execution, per step, per compute time. This model works well for moderate, structured automation. It gets expensive fast for high-volume webhook processing where every inbound event triggers a workflow. A payment processor receiving thousands of events per hour is going to watch the credit burn in a way that makes the monthly bill hard to predict.

The event inspector in Pipedream is good for "why did my workflow fail." Hookdeck's dashboard is good for "what happened to this event in the delivery pipeline." One is workflow debugging. The other is delivery observability. Both are real and useful — they serve engineers at different points in the incident response.

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HookTunnel: Forensic History, Not a Gateway

HookTunnel starts from a different question: not "did the event get delivered?" but "what was in the event?"

Every inbound HTTP request to a HookTunnel hook URL is captured in full — method, headers, body, raw bytes, timestamp, source IP — and stored in searchable history. The history is searchable by provider, by time range, by hook. When you need the payload from last Tuesday's incident, it is there. When you need to know whether the customer_id field was present in the event that arrived during the outage, you open the history and look.

The Pro plan at $19/month adds replay. Not replay to a configured destination — replay to any URL you specify at replay time. That distinction is significant. When you are debugging, you want to replay the original captured payload to your local dev environment running the fixed handler. Or to a staging endpoint. Or to an instrumented version of the handler that logs every field. HookTunnel Pro sends the exact captured payload — original headers, original body — to wherever you point it.

This is a forensics layer, not a gateway. HookTunnel is honest about the difference: no delivery guarantee in the Terms, no retry engine, no event routing. It captures what arrived and makes it available to you indefinitely. The value proposition is access, not delivery.

Compare the incident response experience:

• Hookdeck: "Did this event get delivered to my destination? Show me the attempt timeline." Fifteen-second answer from the dashboard.
• Pipedream: "Did this workflow step succeed? Show me the step-by-step execution." Useful for automation debugging.
• HookTunnel: "What was literally in that payload when it arrived? Let me replay it to my debugger." Useful for payload forensics and post-incident verification.

These questions are not redundant. On a complex incident, you may need all three answers.

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When Each Tool Wins

Hookdeck wins when the question is delivery reliability and pipeline visibility. High-volume production event routing, SOC 2 requirements, a need for 50-retry depth with documented at-least-once delivery, and an operations team that wants a single pane of glass for webhook delivery health. The Team plan at $39/month is priced for exactly this use case.

Pipedream wins when the question is automation orchestration. Multi-step workflows that connect webhooks to downstream APIs, with step-level debugging and a library of pre-built integrations. If the webhook is the trigger for a workflow rather than an event to be processed by your own code, Pipedream's model fits well. The credit pricing works when workflow volume is predictable.

HookTunnel wins when the question is "I need the payload." Incident response that starts with "what did we actually receive?" rather than "was it delivered?" — payload forensics, post-incident verification, replay to ad-hoc targets, multi-provider history in one place. At $19/month flat for Pro, with no credits, no per-request pricing, and no delivery complexity.

The teams that get the most value from HookTunnel are often already running Hookdeck or receiving events directly from a provider. The gap HookTunnel fills is the payload layer: Hookdeck can tell you the event was delivered successfully, but if your handler produced the wrong outcome, you need to see the payload to know why. HookTunnel gives you that, plus the ability to replay to your current dev environment. See HookTunnel features and explore webhook revenue leakage to understand what unobserved payloads can cost.

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The Honest Conclusion

Hookdeck's observability is genuinely impressive and worth the $39/month for any team running production event pipelines that matter. The delivery attempt dashboard eliminates the worst part of webhook incident response — the archaeology across disconnected systems. That is a real improvement to developer experience and a real reduction in mean time to resolution.

Pipedream is powerful and appropriately scoped for automation workflows. If your webhook events are triggers for multi-step automations, Pipedream is a natural fit. The credit pricing is worth watching at scale.

But if your incident starts with "I need that exact payload from when we were down" — if the answer lives in the raw HTTP request that arrived at 11:42 PM last Saturday — there is a new tool that starts exactly there. It has the payload. It keeps it. And it can replay it to wherever you need it.