Webhooks

FullStory’s support for webhooks gives our users new flexibility around when and where they leverage their FullStory data. Now, along with our APIs and Data Export, users have options to fit almost any use case!

If you are a developer looking for detailed technical documentation on webhooks, please check out our Webhooks Developer Guide.

This article will quickly cover the following topics:

• What are webhooks
• High level benefits of webhooks
• Currently available webhooks for use in FullStory
• Getting Started

Let's get to it.

What are Webhooks?

Webhooks (like APIs) are mechanisms for sending information from one application to another. Companies use webhooks to do all sorts of things you are used to encountering in your digital life. Webhooks were probably involved in sending that SMS message you recently received from your bank, for instance.

Webhooks are used for automatically "pushing" information from one system to another whenever something important happens. This is the opposite of an API, which is essentially used to "pull" data into one system from another system by periodically asking for new information. Because they use this "push" mechanism, webhooks have benefits in some situations when compared to traditional APIs.

Benefits of Webhooks

Real Time - Because webhooks are designed to push data from one place to another when an important event occurs, they are capable of moving information around virtually instantly. As a result they are great for getting new information where it is needed as soon as it becomes available. You can contrast this with the fact that APIs have to constantly ask for new information whether it exists yet or not. This schedule of asking for information, known as polling, is a source of information delay.

Efficient - As mentioned above, webhooks automatically push new information to where it is needed as the information becomes available. Because there is no need for one system to constantly poll another, searching for new data, the number of times systems are forced to communicate back and forth is massively reduced. Research from Zapier.com suggests that APIs often waste up to 98.5% of their polls because there is no new data to take action on.

Flexible - With FullStory's new webhooks, our users are empowered to use FullStory data in more places and for more use cases than ever before. We are excited to see all of the new and innovative ways uses that people come up with. If you think of something amazing and useful to do with our current webhooks, or have a request for a new kind of webhook we don't offer yet, please drop us a line at support@fullstory.com.

Available Webhooks in FullStory

Today FullStory gives you the ability to leverage four types of webhooks. Please note that webhooks will only function if you have access to the associated FullStory features and you must be a FullStory Admin in order to manage the settings.

Let's talk about them now!

Events

Available for all FullStory customers.

By creating a webhook event for whenever an event is triggered, you can kick off workflows in other tools based on your FullStory data. If you aren’t already using events, you can learn more here.

Segment Alerts

Available for FullStory Advanced & Enterprise customers.

Go beyond Slack or email notifications by creating segment alerts and webhooks to implement a custom workflow. For instance, fire a webhook event to page an engineer in PagerDuty when a segment indicating dead clicks exceeds a set threshold.

Note Created

Available for all FullStory customers.

Notes in FullStory help teams work together to identify and fix digital experience issues. Now you can easily send your FullStory notes to other platforms, such as Jira, by firing a webhook event when a note is created in FullStory.

Mobile App Crash (Android)

Available for FullStory for Mobile Apps customers.

FullStory for Mobile Apps Applications can already help you better understand what caused your mobile app to crash, but maybe you want to be alerted to crashes as they occur. Setting up a webhook can help you get this data in real time, so you can triage and respond.

Getting Started

Getting started with FullStory’s webhooks is easy! Setup is done in your account settings at Settings > Integrations > Webhooks. All you need to get set up is the URL for the endpoint where FullStory should send the data, and your shared secret used for authentication.

To learn more about setting up webhooks and to dive in to all the additional technical details, check out our Webhooks Developer Guide.