What is an event drain?
An event drain is a streamed feed of webhook lifecycle events delivered to an external observability sink. Instead of webhook telemetry living only in the Hooksbase dashboard, drains push the same events into Datadog, Axiom, your OTLP collector, or an S3 bucket — alongside the rest of your application telemetry.
What flows through a drain
The standard lifecycle events:
delivery.created— an event was ingested and a delivery was scheduledattempt.completed— a delivery attempt finished (success or failure)delivery.succeeded— one attempt succeeded and the delivery is completedelivery.failed— all attempts failed (terminal)delivery.dlq_entered— a delivery moved to the DLQ
Each event includes the metadata needed to correlate it with the originating webhook, source, and destination.
Why drains matter
Most teams already have an observability stack. Webhook telemetry is most useful inside that stack — alongside application logs, infra metrics, and alerting rules — not in a separate dashboard.
Drains make this happen without your application doing the integration work. Hooksbase streams to your sink directly; your existing dashboards add panels for webhook delivery; your existing alerts trigger on webhook anomalies.
Hooksbase drains support five sink types: HTTP (custom endpoints), Axiom, Datadog, S3-compatible object storage, and OTLP HTTP (any OpenTelemetry collector). Drains start on the Pro tier — 1 drain on Pro, 3 on Business, unlimited on Enterprise.
For the practical setup: Stream agent event lifecycle to your observability stack.
Frequently asked questions
What events flow through a drain?
The delivery lifecycle: delivery.created, attempt.completed, delivery.succeeded, delivery.failed, and delivery.dlq_entered. Each carries the metadata needed to correlate it with the originating webhook, source and destination.
Which sinks do Hooksbase drains support?
Five: HTTP for custom endpoints, Axiom, Datadog, S3-compatible object storage, and OTLP HTTP for any OpenTelemetry collector. Drains start on Pro — one drain on Pro, three on Business, unlimited on Enterprise.
What is Hooksbase?
Hooksbase is event infrastructure for AI agents. It ingests events over four channels — HTTP, email, HTML form, and scheduled cron — verifies them, routes them by rule, runs versioned Automations in the event path, and delivers them to HTTP and cloud destinations (AWS SQS, AWS EventBridge, GCP Pub/Sub, and S3-compatible storage) with retries, strict ordering, Standard Webhooks-compatible signing, deterministic replay, and a dead-letter path. It is a hosted service, runs on Cloudflare Workers, is operated at hooksbase.com, and is not affiliated with — and shares no code or ownership with — other similarly named webhook, hook, or tunnelling tools.
Related terms
- Observability
Knowing what arrived, what was attempted, what succeeded, and what failed — without grepping logs.
Read - Webhook
An HTTP request one service sends to another to notify it that something happened.
Read - DLQ (Dead-Letter Queue)
A holding area for messages that failed terminally so they can be inspected and recovered.
Read - Exponential backoff
A retry schedule where each retry waits exponentially longer than the previous one.
Read