Handling 5xx errors in Genesys Cloud webhook consumers

Hey, I have a C# service that consumes Genesys Cloud webhooks. The service is pretty stable, but occasionally it throws a 500 Internal Server Error due to a transient database lock. Genesys Cloud retries the delivery, but my service fails again because the lock isn’t released. This creates a storm of retries.

I want to implement a dead letter queue pattern. If the service fails three times, I want to push the payload to an AWS SQS queue for later processing. The problem is, Genesys Cloud doesn’t seem to have a built-in “dead letter” setting in the webhook configuration UI.

Here is the basic structure of my controller:

[HttpPost("/webhooks/genesys")]
public async Task<IActionResult> HandleWebhook([FromBody] dynamic payload)
{
 try
 {
 await _processor.ProcessAsync(payload);
 return Ok();
 }
 catch (Exception ex)
 {
 // How do I signal Genesys to stop retrying and send this to a DLQ?
 return StatusCode(500, ex.Message);
 }
}

If I return 500, Genesys retries. If I return 200, it assumes success. I can’t return 200 because I haven’t processed it. Is there a specific HTTP status code or header I should return to tell Genesys to drop the message? Or do I have to handle the DLQ logic entirely on my side before returning 200?

you’re overthinking the retry storm. if the DB lock is the issue, pushing to SQS doesn’t solve the root cause, it just delays the pain. the .NET SDK docs for PlatformClient mention exponential backoff, but for webhooks, you control the HTTP response.

don’t return 500. return 429 Too Many Requests with a Retry-After header. Genesys Cloud respects this and will wait before retrying. it’s cleaner than managing a dead letter queue for transient errors.

here’s a quick Azure Function example using HttpRequest.CreateResponse:

if (isTransientError)
{
 var response = req.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.TooManyRequests);
 response.Headers.Add("Retry-After", "30"); // wait 30 seconds
 return response;
}

if you really need DLQ, use Azure Storage Queues. SQS adds latency and cost. just return 429 first. it stops the storm immediately.