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Events and Notifications

Zuora

Events and Notifications

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The Events and Notifications feature provides capabilities for automatic communications with your customers. Notifications are triggered by standard events, Zuora custom events, custom events, or custom scheduled events. Email notifications are automatically sent to your customers from Zuora's default email server or your own SMTP server, whereas callout notifications send information to a specified web page or URL via an HTTPS call to an external web service. Both types of notifications provide information regarding Zuora standard events, Zuora custom events, custom events, or custom scheduled events.

Prerequisites

To access any settings of the Events and Notifications feature through the UI or API, such as notification definitions, event triggers, email or callout templates, or notification histories, you must have at least one of the following permissions or user roles:

  • Manage Billing Settings permission
  • Manage Payments Settings permission
  • Manage Finance Settings permission
  • Platform Administrator user role

For more information about user roles and permissions, see User roles.

Supported event types

The following table describes the supported event types in Zuora:

Event type Description Created by Editable?
Standard event

Standard events are pre-defined business events for Zuora Billing, Zuora Payment, Zuora Finance, and Zuora Central Platform.

For more information, see Standard events.

 Zuora No
Custom event

You can define a custom event by specifying a base object and trigger condition.

Custom events are triggered when the base object changes and the trigger condition is satisfied, and Zuora will send all notifications associated with the triggered custom event.

For more information, see Custom events.

 Tenant users

Yes

For more information, see the following pages:
Zuora custom event

Zuora custom events are pre-defined business events for Zuora Orders and other features.

For more information, see Zuora custom events.

 Zuora No
Custom scheduled event

You can define a custom scheduled event by specifying a base object, base field, and scheduled time (hour and minute).

Zuora evaluates custom scheduled events and associated notifications on a daily basis and will send the notification if the date and time match the custom scheduled event and notification settings.

For more information, see Custom scheduled events.

 Tenant users

Yes

For more information, see the following pages:

Manage notifications

When an event is triggered, Zuora sends notifications associated with that event to inform users via emails or calling pre-defined endpoints.

You can create notification definitions for all event types through the Zuora UI or REST API.

For more information, see the following articles:

Manage email and callout templates

Zuora allows you to manage notification configurations efficiently by using email and callout templates. Email templates include all email-related settings such as the sender and recipient email addresses, and the email subject and body, while callout templates include all callout-related settings such as the endpoint, request body, and authentication information.

You can create email or callout templates for all event types through the Zuora UI or REST API. When creating or editing notification definitions, you can quickly select a pre-configured template, eliminating the need to configure email or callout settings individually.

For more information, see the following articles:

Communication profiles

Communication profiles allow you to send specific event-driven notifications to targeted customer accounts. You can create a new profile and activate the specific notifications in this profile, and then associate this communication profile to the targeted customer accounts. The specific notifications in this profile are sent to your targeted customers when the event occurs.

You can create or edit a communication profile in Zuora UI. See Communication Profiles for the details.

In addition, you can also manage communication profiles through Settings API. See the following tutorials on how to operate on communication profiles through Settings API.

Configure your own SMTP server

You can use your own SMTP server to send out email notifications instead of using Zuora's default email server. The benefits of using your own SMTP server are:

  • More control over emails delivered to your customers because messages are sent through your own server
  • Ability to access sent email records through your SMTP server logs
  • No need to whitelist Zuora email servers because messages are sent through your own server.

See Configure an SMTP Server for Email Notifications for more information.

Reporting on notification histories  

Notification histories based on all event types are available through Data Query, Data Source Exports, and AQuA API to facilitate reporting. Common use cases include:

  • Report on all emails that have failed to be sent, by event, customer name, or date
  • Report on all failed callouts, by event, consumer URL, or date

The history of emails and callouts sent by workflows that have the Customer Notification History setting enabled is also available in the report.

For more information, see Report on notification histories.

Notification histories in Multi-Org enabled tenants

If you have the Multi-Org feature enabled, you can view or resend callout and email notification histories only if they belong to the Org Units you have access to.

This restriction applies when viewing or resending notification histories via the following features and services:

If you have access to more than one Org Unit, you can use the Org Context Switcher to toggle access for notification histories across different Org Units. For more information, see Overview of Multi-Org.

Note

Zuora notification system processes the events in the same order in which they are triggered. The timing and order of callout notifications depend on various factors, such as callout retries, concurrency, and network latency. But Zuora guarantees the best performance possible with the right performance boosters and tuning.