ARB Silent Posts not 100% reliable

[raisedonors]

Hello,

In our production environment we rely on the silent post callout to record ARB transactions in our systems, which allows us to do further processing. This works great 99.5% of the time.

What we are seeing happen very rarely, is our customers ask us, why can't i see this transaction? We go investigate our logs. We see all of the silent posts coming into our system. We have verified that our systems have been "up" and running smoothly.  And we ultimately tell our customer, Sorry, we don't know what happened. It appears that Auth.net never sent us that transaction via Silent Post (even though they should have).

We have a passive, listening architecture setup with the silent post call out url. And its proving to not be 100% reliable. It's the .05% that is really hurting our credibility and trust.

Is there a method in the API we can leverage to audit the silent post callouts? Is there a way to query Auth.net for all of the ARB transactions for a given time period? This would allow us to compare what the silent post url sent to our systems and catch the .05% that we routinely miss.

Any thoughts on how to button this up with verification and auditing?

[pettyfirefly]

Our system has the same issue. What we do is we make a call to transaction detail API(with parameter of last a few hours) and check if we miss any transaction. And then simulate the Silent post to our listener URL.

[RichardH]

Hello @pettyfirefly @raisedonors

We have support for Webhooks in development which will provide a more robust, secure method for receiving notifications.  If you would like to participate in a private beta, please use the contact us form and ask to participate.

Richard

[raisedonors]

Thanks for the creative idea.

[raisedonors]

Thanks Richard, i have submitted a contact us request.

[raisedonors]

Hi @pettyfirefly,

Thanks for the idea. I looked at the API and think you are referring to this method,

https://developer.authorize.net/api/reference/#transaction-reporting-get-transaction-details

But I don't see how you can query by a date range. What API method are you using?

@RichardH I have submitted a request thru the contact-us link. thanks for offering that.

[raisedonors]

@RichardH, i haven't heard back from support on my submission that you suggested. Any possibility of you checking in on that?

[raisedonors]

@RichardH, i haven't heard back from support on my submission that you suggested. Any possibility of you checking in on that?

[Aaron · Accepted solution]

Hi @raisedonors,

I can't speak for support and their response, but the issue is moot as Webhooks support has been officially released:

https://community.developer.authorize.net/t5/The-Authorize-Net-Developer-Blog/New-Webhooks-Support-f...

We recommend anyone using silent posts to investigate Webhook notifications as a possible replacement.

[raisedonors]

Thanks for the great tip @Aaron. I'll proceed this direction.