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A signal is a notification that something has occurred in a CDF process. The Signals API lets you register signal sinks where those signals are delivered, and define signal subscriptions that filter which signals go to which sinks. Signals are intended for event-style notifications and integrations—for example surfacing workflow failures, extractor health, or other operational events to external systems.

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Concepts

  • Sinks — Delivery targets for signals: an email sink or a user sink. Create, list, update, and delete sinks through the sinks endpoints.
  • Subscriptions — Rules that select which signals to receive and which sink should receive them. Manage subscriptions with the subscriptions endpoints.
  • Topics — Types of CDF resources that can emit signals, such as integrations or workflows, and the notification categories you can use when you create subscriptions.
  • Listing signals — Retrieve published signals for a sink with the list endpoint when you need to inspect or debug traffic.
  • Syncing signals — Retrieve signals for a sink incrementally. The cursor is persistent, so you can store it and later fetch only signals that arrived after the previous sync.

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Configure as code

If you use the Cognite Toolkit, you can represent sinks and subscriptions as YAML resources under a signals/ directory. See the toolkit resource library for supported kinds and examples.
The stable (20230101) API reference does not include Signals. Use the beta or alpha API reference for Signals concepts and endpoint documentation. Send cdf-version: beta on requests. For how preview APIs relate to stable, see Beta API reference.

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Rate and concurrency limits

Signals share the general CDF request budgets. For limit types and throttling behavior, see API rate limits.
Last modified on August 28, 2026