Event triggers automatically start workflows when something happens in a connected system. A customer submits a form, a payment succeeds, a file uploads - the trigger fires instantly. For businesses, this means reacting to events in milliseconds instead of hours. Without event triggers, you find out about important events when someone manually checks or a customer complains.
A customer submits a form on your website. You find out three hours later when you check your inbox.
A payment fails in your billing system. Someone notices when the customer complains on social media.
An order ships from your warehouse. The customer wonders why they never got a tracking email.
Your systems are screaming events at you. You just have no one listening.
Part of the Data Infrastructure Layer
An event trigger listens for something to happen in a connected system and kicks off a workflow when it does. Customer submits a form? Trigger fires. Payment succeeds? Trigger fires. File uploaded? Trigger fires. No polling, no checking, no delays.
The magic is the immediacy. The event happens, your system knows about it within milliseconds, and the workflow starts. The customer gets a confirmation email before they have moved their mouse. The inventory system knows about the order before the checkout page finishes loading.
Event triggers turn your systems from passive databases into active participants. Instead of waiting to be asked, they tell you when something matters.
Event triggers solve a universal problem: how do you know when something happened so you can respond to it immediately? The same pattern appears anywhere reaction speed matters.
Subscribe to events from a source system. When the event fires, extract the relevant data. Pass it to the next step in your workflow. This pattern connects any system that can emit events to any automation that needs to react.
A customer fills out your contact form. You discover it when manually checking your inbox hours later...
That is event blindness - an event trigger would notify you instantly when the form is submitted.
Response time: 3 hours to 30 seconds
A subscription payment fails. You find out when the customer complains that their access was cut off...
That is reactive discovery - an event trigger would alert you the moment the payment failed.
Detection time: 2 days to instant
A document gets uploaded to the shared drive. The person waiting for it has to keep checking manually...
That is polling fatigue - an event trigger would notify them automatically when the file appears.
Wasted time checking: 45 min daily to zero
A key metric crosses a threshold. You only notice in next week's dashboard review...
That is delayed awareness - an event trigger would alert you the moment the threshold is crossed.
Awareness delay: 7 days to instant
What events are happening in your systems right now that nobody is listening for?
Click any source to simulate an event. Watch the trigger fire and the workflow execute.
Each click fires a random event type from that source.
Click a source above to fire an event...
External systems push events to you
You give the source system a URL. When an event happens, it POSTs the event data to that URL. Your trigger receives it instantly. No polling, no delays. Most modern platforms support this.
You check for new events on a schedule
Every 5 minutes, you ask the API: "Anything new since my last check?" You get back any new records and process them. Works with any API, but introduces delay and uses API quota.
Listen for changes in your own data
A database trigger fires when a row is inserted, updated, or deleted. No external system needed. Useful for reacting to changes in your own application data.
Answer a few questions to get a recommendation tailored to your situation.
Does the source system support webhooks?
"Customer submits ticket - 12 seconds later, the right person is notified with context"
A customer fills out your support form. Without event triggers, that ticket sits in a queue until someone checks. With triggers, the submission fires a webhook, the ticket is classified by AI, routed to the right team, and a notification with full context lands in their Slack channel. All before the customer sees the 'thank you' page.
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This component works the same way across every business. Explore how it applies to different situations.
Notice how the core pattern remains consistent while the specific details change
Your webhook endpoint throws an error. The event is lost forever. A week later, you discover 200 orders never synced to your fulfillment system because no one noticed the webhook was failing.
Instead: Log every incoming event before processing. Set up dead letter queues for failed events. Alert on error rates. Make event processing idempotent so you can replay safely.
You process "order updated" before "order created" because the network delivered them out of sequence. Your system crashes trying to update an order that does not exist yet.
Instead: Include timestamps and sequence numbers in your events. Check if prerequisite data exists before processing. Use queues that guarantee ordering when it matters.
Your webhook endpoint does all the work inline: database writes, API calls, email sending. It takes 8 seconds. The source system times out and retries, causing duplicate processing.
Instead: Accept the event, return 200 immediately, then process asynchronously. Use a queue to decouple receiving from processing. This also helps with burst traffic.
An event trigger is a mechanism that starts a workflow automatically when a specific event occurs in a connected system. When a customer submits a form, makes a payment, or uploads a file, the trigger detects this and immediately kicks off the appropriate automation. No manual intervention, no polling delays.
Use event triggers when you need immediate reaction to system events. Customer actions like form submissions, purchases, or cancellations. System events like file uploads, data changes, or API calls. Business events like invoice generation, order fulfillment, or status changes. If waiting even minutes would hurt the experience, you need event triggers.
Webhooks push events to you instantly when they happen. Polling requires you to repeatedly ask "anything new?" on a schedule. Webhooks are faster and more efficient but require the source system to support them. Polling works with any API but introduces delay and wastes API calls checking when nothing changed.
The most common mistakes are ignoring failed events (losing data silently), assuming events arrive in order (they often do not), and processing events synchronously (causing timeouts and duplicates). Always log events before processing, handle out-of-order delivery, and return acknowledgment immediately before doing heavy work.
Implement a dead letter queue for events that fail processing. Log every incoming event with a unique ID before attempting to process. Make your processing idempotent so the same event can be safely processed twice. Set up alerts on error rates. Build replay capability to reprocess failed events after fixing the underlying issue.
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Choose the path that matches your current situation
You manually check systems to discover new events
Some webhooks work but others are unreliable
Event processing works but want better reliability
You have learned how events from external systems start your workflows. The next step is understanding how to transform that raw event data into a format your system can use.