How-to guide

Operational runbook: a target went down

Delivery isn't just "send and retry" — it's something you operate. When a target fails, Queuey gives you a clear path from detect → diagnose → resume → replay, without losing events or guessing.

Two kinds of target trouble
Probing — a transient outage; the circuit is open and Queuey is auto-probing to recover. It resumes on its own, no action needed. Requires action — a sticky failure (e.g. auth rejected); the queue holds and waits for you to fix the target and resume. Knowing which is which is half the job.
  1. 1 — See what's wrong

    When a target stops accepting deliveries, Queuey surfaces it as an issue on the queue with a target-health state, instead of silently burning retries. The events pile up as held rather than lost.

  2. 2 — Read the diagnosis

    Each issue carries a rule-based diagnosis (and an incident report) explaining what failed and why — the status codes, the failure class, when it started. You don't reverse-engineer it from raw logs.

  3. 3 — Fix the target, then clear & resume

    Once the endpoint is healthy again, clear the requires-action lock to resume the queue. Held events flow again from where they stopped — in order, for ordered queues.

  4. 4 — Replay what failed

    Events that exhausted their retries are in the dead-letter queue. Inspect them, then replay — a single event, or the whole filtered set in bulk — once the underlying cause is fixed.

  5. 5 — Close it out

    Resolving the issue produces an after-action summary, so the next person (or the next incident) starts with context instead of a cold trail.

Why this matters

Most webhook tooling stops at retry-and-log. The operational layer — target-health, safe holds instead of duplicate side effects, clear & resume, and replay — is what turns "our webhooks are failing and we don't know why" into a five-minute fix. It's the difference between a delivery service and a delivery engine.

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