Consultants play a crucial role in implementing Salesforce for their clients, and one often overlooked aspect of that is event monitoring. We don’t think about it until it’s too late, and we’re left asking ourselves how this modification could have happened to this many records without anyone noticing. The simple fact of the matter is this – We’re human. We can’t monitor everyone in the system’s activity at once. That’s where event monitoring comes in.

Salesforce offers event monitoring through an add-on service, called Salesforce Shield. Let me tell you a little bit about it, and then I’ll tell you about a time I was glad that my client had it.

Salesforce Shield

Salesforce Shield has four main components;

• Platform encryption
• Field audit trail
• Event, monitoring
• Einstein data detection.

If you work in any sector that requires legal compliance, you probably already have Salesforce Shield.

Platform Encryption

This component encrypts all of your data on Salesforce’s servers. This way if ever there was a data breach, you’d still be protected because the encrypted data would be unreadable. For a deeper look at how Salesforce handles data protection at every level, check out our post on designing user security and visibility in Salesforce.

Field Audit Trail

Field tracking history is built into Salesforce by default, letting you track up to 20 fields per object. But Field Audit Trail offers you more. With this, you can track up to 60 fields per object and store that data for up to 10 years.

Salesforce Event Monitoring

There are two types of monitoring included here: core event monitoring, andreal-time event monitoring. Core event monitoring allows the admin to go over all of the data that has happened over the course of the last 30 days. After 30 days the log files are purged. There’s also real-time event monitoring where you can be notified if a user takes certain actions.

For example, if a sales user who’s about to leave your company starts exporting reports with contacts, you can set up precautions that let you in real-time prevent them fromexporting those and other reports, and even lock the user. For a more technical deep-dive into how architects and admins should think about event monitoring, Salesforce has published an excellentArchitect’s Guide to Event Monitoring.

Einstein Data Detect

This component detects sensitive data such as credit card numbers, emails, Social Security numbers, URLs, and IP addresses. Then it works with platform encryption, encrypting the data at rest.

The Time It Saved My Bacon

On a weekly standing call with a client, they raised a concern about how the close date on a handful of Opportunities had been changed repeatedly per record, and the system user was the user responsible for all the changes. There was a Flow evaluating the record criteria every time it was updated… when it should’ve only been once. That was happening for over a year.

Thankfully, in this instance, we had Event Monitoring. We were able to query all the data, and with some formulas and uploads, it was like that data mishap never even happened. I’m grateful the client has Event Monitoring because we were able to restore their data successfully ensuring quality and success on their end. The backups we had from Event Monitoring allowed us to rather easily, and within a timely fashion, get them back on track.

Conclusion

Event monitoring is something I’d recommend that all consultants have. It empowers them to secure the platform, enhance performance, ensure compliance, and resolve issues proactively. By leveraging event monitoring Salesforce consultants can deliver greater value to their clients, ensuring the environments are robust and secure.