API keys vs. webhooks

Two different, complementary mechanisms it's easy to conflate.

HeimPulse has two ways to connect external systems, and they’re opposites, not alternatives:

• API keys (this API, /v1) are how you call HeimPulse - you hold the credential, you make the request, on your own schedule. Use them to create a service as part of infrastructure-as-code, or open/resolve an incident from your own alerting or ChatOps tooling.
• Webhooks (notification channels, configured in the dashboard) are how HeimPulse calls you
  • HeimPulse holds the credential (a signing secret) and pushes an event to a URL you configured, the moment an incident is created, updated, or a certificate is about to expire.

A concrete example of using both together: you might use a webhook to get notified the instant an incident opens, and an API key in the same automation to post a status update to it a few minutes later once your on-call engineer has confirmed root cause.

They don’t share credentials, scopes, or configuration - setting up one doesn’t affect the other.