As developers, one of our biggest concerns can be designing scaleable product & system implementations. We want the solutions we craft to be low cost (with minimal technical & financial debt!) and simple for others to sustain. A challenge many Zoom developers of all license types face is running into API rate limits. To help inspire a fix for your use case, outside of increasing rate limits, we will explore an easy Zoom API Events configuration that helps you access the information you need without API calls. Refresher: What Are API Rate Limits An API rate limit is a cap on the number of requests an account can send to a specific endpoint in a certain period of time. Ultimately, API rate limits exist to sustain data resources for all users. They prevent APIs from being abused by certain types of internet security threats and help maintain scaleability to ensure consistent quality response times. Certain Zoom API endpoints are more susceptible to rate limit responses because they are resource intensive (Dashboard API endpoints) and/or need to be accessible across the greatest percentage of users since they are essential to the foundation of the Zoom product platform (Create/Update/Delete Meeting API endpoints). Why Zoom API Events Are Helpful Zoom API Events are notifications you can enable when certain things happen. When these things happen, you can point those notifications to a place where you can receive webhooks about those events. Webhooks, sometimes called reverse APIs, are a one-way data-sharing service that take up less resources than APIs so make a great compliment to APIs. Webhooks at Zoom do not count as API requests/calls so you will not run into rate limit errors from using Zoom API Events. Zoom API Events Usage Example There are 50+ Zoom API Events to compliment our APIs. Let’s explore an example use case and implementation: You’re a developer at a small remote school and teachers want to see how long students attended a topic review meeting for: You could query the list meeting participants endpoint which includes participant “join_time” and “leave_time”, but this has a rate limit label of “heavy” and requires a business or higher plan (which the school does not have). [image] From List Meeting Participants Response Payload [Screen Shot 2022-02-01 at 11.20.42 AM] From List Meeting Participants API endpoint documemation Alternatively, you could use the meeting.participant_joined and meeting.particpant_left events to send notifications to an endpoint hosted on a site like Requestbin where you see webhooks with payload details about each meeting participant. Let’s test this out right now: Create a Webhook Only App OR add these events to a pre-existing app where you need to access the data: [Screen Shot 2022-02-01 at 11.34.16 AM] After filling out the information on the “Information” tab, head over to the “Features” tab. You’ll notice a “verification token” that should only be securely shared with approved admin & developers: [Screen Shot 2022-02-01 at 11.41.57 AM] Toggle the “event subscriptions” which will then show an “add event subscription” field: [Screen Shot 2022-02-01 at 11.47.37 AM] Click “add event subscription”. I’m going to name mine “Participant Attendance” for the sake of this demo. You’ll also see "event notification endpoint URL–this is where Requestbin comes in!: [Screen Shot 2022-02-01 at 11.50.29 AM] Head over to https://requestbin.com/ and click “create request bin”. Create an account or log in as you see fit: [Screen Shot 2022-02-01 at 11.51.48 AM] After you log in, you’ll see a page like this where you’ll copy your event notification url for your webhook app. This is where you’ll receive webhooks for the Zoom API Events: [Screen Shot 2022-02-01 at 11.53.47 AM] Copy that link and paste it into the “event notification endpoint URL” field on your webhook app. NEXT click “add events”. I added the participant events I needed and clicked “done” to save: [Screen Shot 2022-02-01 at 12.36.21 PM] Now I’ll create a meeting and have a participant join. The event notification should fire off to Requestbin (hosted by Pipedream_ where I’ll see the webhooks: [Screen Shot 2022-02-01 at 12.42.03 PM] Here’s the expanded payload for the meeting.participant_joined event where I see detailed information about my participant including their join time! [Screen Shot 2022-02-01 at 12.45.14 PM] After my participant leaves, I see another event notification come in right after. I click on that event and expand the webhook details: [Screen Shot 2022-02-01 at 12.51.12 PM] As you can see, using these Zoom API Event notifications, a webhook only app on the Zoom Marketplace, and Requestbin/Pipedream I’m able to get the participant join and leave time without any API requests! I can extract this data and add it to a database of my choosing to keep track of this information for my records. This process was completely free, easy to implement, and meets the needs of my usecase. If you found this helpful, let me know. I’m happy to hear any other feedback or information about other webhook usecases or resources. Gianni

Gianni… it would be really useful if that participant join/left webhook provided the account number (or some indicator that it’s the same as the host). if you (like I do) want to know if this participant is internal (same account as host) you still need to call the Zoom API to get that one field… Seems like it would be super useful. BTW. . the webhooks (events) are fantastic! and the new docs are great too. Thanks for all the hard work the zoom API team is doing…

Hi @gpinkham , Thank you so much for your feedback! I’ve shared your comments with our team who appreciate the affirmation for the new docs. The point about an account_id field is also appreciated. At current, account id access is reserved for Master/ISV plans so this is likely why it’s not included in our API event response payloads. Would something like an is_internal boolean meet your needs? Best, Gianni

@gianni.zoom is_internal flag would be fantastic! thanks again

Okay awesome, @gpinkham – I’ll communicate this a feature request and see if it can get on the product dev board.

Using Zoom API Events to Reduce API Requests: Testing with Webhook Only App & Requestbin (Free Developer Tools)

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Using Zoom API Events to Reduce API Requests: Testing with Webhook Only App & Requestbin (Free Developer Tools)

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