What's New in HookWatch: February 2026

February was a big month for HookWatch. We shipped the Sandbox, overhauled the CLI, added cron job scheduling, and made dozens of improvements across the platform. Here's the full rundown.

Webhook Sandbox

The headline feature this month. The Sandbox lets you send test webhooks, track delivery in real-time, and inspect responses — all from your browser.

• Request builder with method, headers, and body editor
• Pre-built templates for Stripe, GitHub, Shopify, and Slack
• Event Timeline showing each delivery stage as it happens
• Signature tester for validating HMAC implementations
• Quick test mode with a built-in echo endpoint

No more curl scripts and log digging. Test your handlers in seconds.

Cron Job Scheduling

HookWatch now supports scheduled webhooks. Define cron expressions and HookWatch will fire webhooks on your schedule — useful for health checks, periodic syncs, and recurring notifications.

• Standard cron syntax with a visual schedule preview
• Cloud + local execution — run jobs from HookWatch cloud or your own machine via the CLI
• Execution history with status tracking (pending, running, success, failed, timeout)
• Run Now button for on-demand triggering

# Create a scheduled job
hookwatch cron create \
  --name "Health Check" \
  --schedule "*/5 * * * *" \
  --command "curl -s https://api.myapp.com/health"

# Run the cron executor locally
hookwatch cron service

CLI Overhaul: Pure gRPC

We removed the REST API client from the CLI entirely. All communication now goes through gRPC, which means:

• Faster commands — gRPC binary protocol vs JSON over HTTP
• Streaming support — real-time log tailing and event watching
• Simpler auth flow — login via gRPC, auto-create API key, done

The CLI still works exactly the same from a user perspective. The change is under the hood but makes everything snappier.

Improved Response Viewer

The Event Timeline now renders response bodies as formatted, syntax-highlighted JSON instead of raw text. When you're debugging a webhook at 2am, the difference between a wall of text and properly indented JSON is everything.

• Syntax highlighting — keys, strings, numbers, booleans all color-coded
• Auto-formatting — JSON is parsed and indented automatically
• Scrollable container — large responses stay contained
• Plain text fallback — non-JSON responses display cleanly

Real-Time WebSocket Updates

Events across the dashboard now update in real-time via WebSocket connections. When a webhook is delivered, retried, or fails, you see it immediately — no manual refresh needed.

This applies to:

• Event detail pages
• Endpoint event lists
• The Sandbox timeline
• Cron job execution status

Alert Notifications

Configure alerts for webhook failures across multiple channels:

• Slack — messages to any channel
• Discord — webhook-based notifications
• Email — digest or per-event alerts
• Telegram — bot notifications

Set thresholds so you're alerted when failure rates spike, not on every transient glitch.

What's Next

March is focused on team collaboration and multi-tenant support. We're building:

• Team workspaces with shared endpoints and events
• Role-based access for team members
• Audit logs for compliance
• Usage dashboards for monitoring webhook volume

Stay tuned. Follow us on Twitter for updates or check back on the blog.