Viewing payloads of notifications

You can view the payloads of incoming notifications in IBM Cloud Event Notifications to validate notification payload formats, set up filters, and troubleshoot issues without routing notifications to external webhooks.

The ability to view notification payloads allows you to inspect the format and content of notifications sent to your Event Notifications instance. By examining the payload data, you can identify available fields, understand data formats, and verify that notifications contain the expected information. This capability is particularly valuable when setting up topic filters to route notifications based on specific field values, and when troubleshooting notification delivery issues to diagnose why notifications may not be reaching their intended destinations.

Enabling notification storage

When you enable the Store Notifications for a source, Event Notifications begins storing incoming notifications from that source. The Notifications column displays the number of notification payloads available for that source.

Store Notifications is not supported for periodic timer sources.

To start storing notifications, you must enable the Store Notifications for the source you want to monitor.

To enable notifications storage:

In the IBM Cloud console, go to your Event Notifications instance.
In the navigation menu, click Sources.
Locate the source for which you want to store notifications.
In the Store Notifications column, click the toggle to enable notification storage for that source.

After you enable the Store Notifications, Event Notifications begins storing all incoming notification payloads for that source. Notification payloads retain for 7 days and are automatically purged after this period. Event Notifications stores a maximum of 100 notification payloads per instance. When this limit reaches, older notification payloads are automatically deleted to make room for new notification payloads.

Viewing stored notifications

After you enable the Store Notifications, you can view stored notification payloads for the source.

A side panel opens on the right side of the screen, displaying the stored notification payloads for the selected source.

The Source Events side panel contains the following sections:

Source details

The top section displays information about the selected source:

Source name: The name of the source
Source ID: The unique identifier of the source
Source type: The type of source (for example, api, resource-lifecycle-events)

Search

A search field allows you to filter notification payloads by entering search criteria. The search filters notification payloads based on notification ID, timestamp, notification description (ibmendefaultshort parameter from the payload).

List of notification payloads

The main section displays a paginated list of stored notification payloads with the following columns:

Notification ID: The unique identifier of the notification payload
Description: A brief description of the notification payload
Timestamp: The date and time when the notification payload was received

Viewing notification details

To view the complete notification payload:

In the list of notification payloads within the side panel, locate the notification you want to inspect.
Click the expand button on the notification row to view the payload.
You can view the notification payload now in JSON format.

You can copy the JSON payload by clicking the copy icon in the upper right corner of the payload display.

Disabling notification storage

When you no longer need to view notification payloads, you can disable the Store Notifications toggle to stop storing notifications.

To disable notification storage, in the Store Notifications column, click the toggle to disable notification storage for that source.

When you disable the Store Notifications, Event Notifications stops storing new notification payloads for that source. Existing stored notification payloads retain until 7 days or until the total notification payloads reach the count 100 and older notifications are automatically deleted.