Notifications and Event Triggers

Deliver timely, reliable signals to humans and systems when EO events matter.

What Notifications Cover

Notifications define event taxonomy, subscriptions, delivery channels, retries, logs, and escalation behaviour for both people and integrated systems.

Why Notifications Matter

Without trustworthy notifications, users miss time-sensitive updates and automation pipelines rely on brittle polling loops.

What Good Looks Like

Mature platforms emit consistent machine-readable events, support user-configured subscriptions, and provide delivery assurance with operational visibility.

Minimum Requirements

  • Defined event types for data, jobs, delivery, failures, and platform status.
  • Subscriptions with filtering, channel selection, and severity handling.
  • Email and in-app human notifications plus webhook/system delivery.
  • Reliable delivery with retries, logs, and acknowledgement workflows.
  • Escalation paths for critical failures and delayed acknowledgements.

Event Taxonomy

Data Availability Events

Signal when new or updated EO products are ready.

Job State Events

Emit queued/running/completed/failed transitions consistently.

Delivery Events

Notify when download or API delivery endpoints are ready.

Failure Events

Include reason codes and retry guidance.

Maintenance and Status Events

Publish planned maintenance and active incidents.

Threshold and Alert Events

Trigger alerts from policy or monitoring thresholds.

Subscription and Delivery Model

User Filters

Filter by AOI, product, mission, tenant, and severity.

Channel Selection

Support email, in-app, webhook, and queue delivery.

Cadence and Rate Limits

Provide digest and real-time options with limits.

Priority and Severity

Attach severity levels and response expectations.

Deduplication and Suppression

Prevent alert storms with deduplication policies.

Human Notifications

Expose acknowledgment flows and escalation paths for unresolved critical alerts.

System-to-System Eventing

Webhooks

Signed webhook payloads with delivery retries.

Callback Retries

Retry with backoff and terminal-failure logging.

Queue or Bus Integration

Offer event bus integration for high-volume consumers.

Payload Standards

Version machine-readable schemas across the platform.

Signature Verification

Verify source authenticity and prevent replay.

Delivery Assurance and Operational Status

Maintain delivery logs and status dashboards that show pending, delivered, acknowledged, and failed notifications.

Notification Decisions

Choose push vs pull defaults, escalation timing, schema versioning strategy, and shared vs per-tenant event streams.

Metrics and Health Signals

  • Notification delivery success and latency.
  • Retry rate and dead-letter volume.
  • Acknowledgement time by severity.
  • Suppression/deduplication effectiveness.
  • Webhook signature verification failure rate.

Anti-Patterns

  • Inconsistent event schemas across services.
  • No delivery logging or replay support.
  • All alerts sent at same severity.
  • Polling-only integration model.

Implementation Checklist

  • Is ownership clear?
  • Are minimum controls defined?
  • Are failure modes addressed?
  • Are measurable health signals defined?
  • Are anti-patterns named?
  • Are dependencies on other domains explicit?
  • Is there at least one EO-specific implementation example?
  • Is there a practical implementation checklist?

Example EO Patterns

  • Flood response workflows receive high-severity event notifications for new imagery over watched AOIs.
  • Customer webhook gets signed job-complete event with direct retrieval links.
  • Operations dashboard tracks unacknowledged critical delivery failures with escalation timers.

Related Domains

Automation, Reliability and Resilience, Security

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