What is a webhook
A webhook is how one system tells another that something just happened – instead of your app repeatedly asking OneXtel ‘is my message delivered yet?’, you give OneXtel a URL on your server, and the moment a message is delivered (or fails, or a customer replies), OneXtel sends an HTTP POST straight to that URL with the details. No polling, no delay – just an event landing in your system in real time, the same way most modern APIs work. For a CPaaS platform, that mostly comes down to one thing: delivery reports.
How does a webhook work
You register a callback URL – an HTTPS endpoint on your own server – with the platform you’re using. From then on, whenever a specific event happens, that platform packages the event data (say, message ID, status, timestamp, recipient number) as JSON and POSTs it to your URL. Your server receives it like any other incoming request, reads the payload, and updates whatever it needs to – marking an order as confirmed, logging a failed OTP, triggering a retry. There’s no ongoing connection to maintain and no need to keep asking ‘anything new?’ every few seconds. The trade-off is that your endpoint has to be reachable and respond quickly (usually within a few seconds) or the sending platform may retry or drop the callback, so most teams keep webhook handlers simple – accept the POST, store it, respond 200 OK, and process it asynchronously.
How OneXtel helps with webhooks
On OneXtel, webhooks are how delivery reports actually reach you. When you send a message – SMS, WhatsApp, or another channel – through the Aura API (docs.onextel.com), you configure a callback URL once, and OneXtel POSTs a delivery report to it for every message: sent, delivered, failed, and the timestamp for each. For SMS this ties directly into DLT – since every message goes out under a registered entity, Sender ID and template, the delivery report tells you whether it actually cleared the carrier or bounced. The OTP & Authentication solution uses the same mechanism to confirm whether an OTP landed via SMS, WhatsApp, voice call or email fallback. And because OneXtel runs SMS, WhatsApp, Voice/IVR, RCS, email and push on one platform, you get one webhook format across channels instead of stitching together different callback structures for each one.
Why it matters
Without webhooks, you’d be polling an API every few seconds to check message status – wasteful for you and for the platform, and slower to react. With webhooks, you know within moments whether an OTP reached a customer, whether an order confirmation bounced, or whether a WhatsApp message actually got delivered – and your system can act on it immediately: retry over a fallback channel, flag a bad number, or close a support ticket. For anything time-sensitive – OTPs, payment confirmations, delivery alerts – that speed is the whole point. It also keeps your infrastructure lighter: one small endpoint replaces thousands of status-check requests a day. If you’re evaluating a CPaaS provider, whether it gives you reliable, real-time webhook callbacks – not just a dashboard you have to refresh – is a fair test of how production-ready its delivery reporting actually is.