Integration best practices
Quick answer
Design integrations that survive volume, outages and staff changes.
Key takeaways
- Name owners on both sides and document the contract
- Dedicated least privilege integration accounts
- Timeouts, retries and idempotency are not optional
- Alert on error rate, not on every single failure
Contracts and ownership
Every integration needs a named owner on both sides, a documented payload contract and an agreed error path. Most integration incidents are really ownership incidents: something changed and nobody told the other team.
Technical defaults
A short list of defaults prevents most production problems.
- Dedicated integration user with least privilege, never a personal account
- Connection alias and credential records, never hard coded endpoints or secrets
- Timeouts on every outbound call and retry policy for transient errors
- Idempotent operations keyed on a client reference so replays are safe
- Payload limited to fields you use, so upstream changes break less
Observability
Log a correlation id on both sides, alert on error rate rather than single failures, and keep a dashboard that shows volume and latency per integration. When something breaks at 2am, the person paged needs to see which integration and how long it has been failing.
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Check your understanding
What makes a replayed message safe?
- A. A timeout
- B. Idempotency keyed on a client reference
- C. A larger payload
- D. Basic auth
Show answer
B. Idempotency keyed on a client reference
Idempotent operations produce the same result when repeated.
Which account should an integration use?
- A. A named admin
- B. A shared personal account
- C. A dedicated least privilege account
- D. The requester account
Show answer
C. A dedicated least privilege account
Dedicated accounts are attributable and can be restricted.