20 Free, Easy Tricks On How To Monitor Your Salesforce Org

Organizations spend thousands of dollars, some even a few million on Salesforce and related services each year because of their strong belief in the CRM. It’s no surprise really as Salesforce directly impacts productivity at every level of the organization and can reduce overhead while boosting profitability, which calls for the need to learn how to monitor Salesforce org.

Also Read:

• The New Copado Value Stream Management Capabilities a Timely Boost for Salesforce Developers
• Are You Using the Salesforce Interaction Studio? Here’s Why You Should
• Marketing automation in manufacturing: How to Leverage Marketing Automation to Fast-Track Manufacturing ROI
• Data Security and Higher Education Technology: It’s Time Higher Ed Institutions Took Cybersecurity More Seriously
• Digital Transformation in Education Industry: How To Accelerate The Digital Journey

Unfortunately, sometimes we forget one very important part of Salesforce usage – Org monitoring! Although Salesforce is so effective it will get the job done as long as you have the right team, monitoring is the only way to catch potential issues, report them, and get them resolved.

How To Monitor Salesforce Org

Fortunately, monitoring your Salesforce Org is a straightforward process. The following are 20 free ways to monitor your org.

Use the lightning usage app

The first hack on how to monitor Salesforce org is to use the Lightning Apps. The Salesforce Lightning Usage App tracks daily and monthly active users in Lightning Experience and Salesforce App, the number of users who switch to Salesforce Classic, the profiles of users who’ve switched to Salesforce Classic most often, and the types of Browsers in Lightning Experience, among others.

Use the optimizer report

The optimizer report in Salesforce gauges how your implementation stacks up to Salesforce’s best practices. We recommend running it monthly before you install any new apps and before any Salesforce release. Alternatively, consider running it twice a quarter, i.e., every six weeks

Use salesforce health check

The health check report allows you to view the overall health of your Salesforce Org security. For instance, you can generate health check reports to find out how well your Org meets Salesforce security standards. Make sure to optimize highlighted areas to minimize your risk exposure.

Use the portal health check

The Salesforce portal health check report shows how much access your users have to the data within your organization. It also provides valuable information that the organization can use to boost portal security.

Monitor with Force.com source security scanner

The Force.com security scanner allows you to inspect your Salesforce org for field changes and alternations that may signal pending problems. For instance, you’ll notice that it organizes records by “Created Date,” “Created By,” and “Last Modified By.” You can use these details to determine when the suspicious changes were made and who made them.

Monitor with record modification fields

Field history tracking also allows you to track changes to important field values. Simply select field history tracking on the desired objects and fields and set it to scan. It will highlight any changes and when they were made. Remember that the field history tracking feature retains objects for up to 18 months. You can scan up to 20 fields per object.

Setup API usage notifications

API usage notifications allow you to receive email notifications whenever the org exceeds a specified limit for API requests within a specified period.

Setup apex exception emails

Apex exception emails let org users set up emails to receive email notifications in case your Apex code encounters an unexpected exception.

Use Salesforce field audit trail

A field audit trail is a paid solution that allows users to extend the capabilities of field history tracking. Whereas field history tracking only allows you to track 20 fields per object, field audit trail allows users to track up to 60 fields per object. Additionally, it retains history data for up to 10 years rather than 18 months.

Paused and waiting for interviews

Paused and waiting interviews allow you to monitor paused flows by users pending scheduled process builder actions. The tool tells you how many flows are paused and when the paused process actions will resume.

Login history

Another trick on how to monitor Salesforce org is to review your login history. You can track your Salesforce org by periodically reviewing the login history data to determine anomalies in the login attempts. For instance, were there any instances where one user attempted (unsuccessfully) to log in more than five times? If so, then it might point to an attempted brute force attack.

How to monitor Salesforce Org: Setup audit trail

Viewing setup audit trails reveals recent setup changes that you and members of your team have made to your org in the last few days. This can be crucial in organizations with many admins. If someone made a few changes during setup but you’re finding it difficult to trace the changes, set up audit trails will reveal the source openly.

Transaction security policy

Transaction security policy monitors events within your org in real-time and takes appropriate action. For instance, the function may deny multiple login sessions for a single user. It can also block users from exporting files.

Consider event monitoring

Event monitoring helps Salesforce users uncover insights to keep the org secure. It allows you to closely track events (user activity). You can even view individual events and track trends in events to highlight anomalies and abnormal behavior.

Consider outbound message delivery status

You also want to know the status of your outbound messages. Were they delivered? If not, why? What’s holding up the delivery process? The outbound message delivery status function will give the status of all outbound messages.

Time-based workflow

Time-based workflow allows you to monitor the workflow actions scheduled to ensue once the workflow rule is activated. The actions are typically placed in the queue after their respective workflow rules are triggered.

Debug logs

Debug logs help to monitor database operations, system processes, and errors that occur during transactions. You can highlight a user whose transactions you want to monitor. Then the system will generate debug logs as appropriate.

Email logs

Email log files keep track of all emails sent from the org, thus allow you to track or verify vital information, such as sender details, recipient data, time and date sent, and delivery status. You can also check for any sending errors.

Duplicate error logs

Duplicate error logs are designed to help you troubleshoot system errors that may prevent duplicate rules or matching rules from running. The system stores these errors for 90 days after which they are deleted.

System overview

The salesforce org system overview provides a summary of key usage data. Although it is just a one-page dashboard, it’s filled with tons of valuable information and even allows you to add system overview messages to your homepage. The messages appear when your organization is approaching its usage limit.

It’s time to implement the above hacks on how to monitor Salesforce org

Monitoring your Org means you are on top of your investment and is likely to benefit the most. Keeping your system monitored at all times with these tricks lowers the chances of fatal system collapse.