About event sinks

Information about the current status of the Pexip Infinity platform and any conference instances currently in progress can normally be obtained using the Management status API. However, in deployments with high levels of live system monitoring activity, such as those managed by service providers, frequent polling of the Management Node via the API can cause performance issues.

To avoid this you can configure the system to automatically send details of every participant and conference management event to an external service known as an event sink. When an event occurs, the Conferencing Node sends this information using a simple POST of JSON data to the nominated event sink server.

What information is sent?

To view which events are sent to an event sink, go to System > Event sinks and from the bottom right of the page, select View schema. The same information can be downloaded as a Swagger or OpenAPI JSON document by selecting Download Swagger schema or Download OpenAPI schema.

You can also use a test site such as https://webhook.site to view live event data being sent.

Note that:

  • Conference start and end event times are from the Conferencing Node's perspective and not the Management Node's perspective.
  • You cannot control which events are sent to an event sink.

For a complete description of the information that is sent, including examples, see Event sink API.

Configuring event sinks

Each system location can be configured with one or more event sinks. The same event sink can be used for more than one system location.

To add, edit or delete an event sink, go to System > Event sinks.

The available options are:

Option Description
Name The name used to refer to this event sink. Each event sink must have a unique name.
Description An optional description of this event sink.
URL The URL of the external server to which events are sent.
Username and Password The username and password used to authenticate to the external server when sending events. The username is case-sensitive. Leave these fields blank if authentication is not required.
Verify TLS Whether to enable TLS verification when sending events. Only valid if the URL is HTTPS.
Location The system locations in which to use this event sink.

Troubleshooting event sink failures

If an event cannot be delivered to an event sink, the node will try again after 1 second. If it fails again it tries again after 2 seconds, then 4, 8, 16 seconds and so on — it keeps doubling the timeout. In this case, the events may not necessarily be sent in sequence number (seq field) order.

If the timeout exceeds 30 minutes it will instead raise an "Eventsink Reached Maximum Backoff" alarm and stop the event sink publisher for that particular event sink. (The retry/timeout parameters are not configurable.)

To resolve "Eventsink Reached Maximum Backoff" alarms:

  1. Check support.event logs for the reason for the event sink failures.
  2. Take the appropriate action to resolve the failures.
  3. Restart the event sink process:

    1. Remove the event sink from its associated system locations.
    2. Wait for the removal changes to synchronize to the Conferencing Nodes.
    3. Reassociate the event sink with its original system locations.