Introducing 24×7 Proactive Monitoring

We’ve all been there. You’re online trying to get something done and all of a sudden things start to slow down, or even stop. When it’s a video call with your mom, it’s annoying. But when it affects everyone at your work, it’s bad for your bottom line.

Wouldn’t it be great if someone had told you about these issues earlier, helped you fix them faster — before they became really bad — and helped you learn more each time so you could keep them from happening as often in the future?

That’s exactly the concept behind our newest offering: Proactive Monitoring, a new Success Cloud monitoring and issue-response service that combines Salesforce technology, Salesforce insight, and Salesforce technical guidance to minimize the risk of business disruption.

 

24×7 monitoring of your critical business solutions guided by Salesforce experts

 

After two years of piloting and testing Proactive Monitoring, we have learned something from our customers loud and clear. If you are running critical business processes on Salesforce, you need near-real-time monitoring and alerts to warn you earlier, and help you prevent and respond to issues quickly if your Salesforce org slows down or goes down. And, of course, you want this to come with technical guidance from our experts, all tailored to how you use Salesforce.

Only Salesforce can provide this service, because, as the world’s most trusted CRM platform, our customer performance data is only accessible by us, and our monitoring engineers are the only ones who have experience working with this data on behalf of more than 150,000 customers since 1999.

 

What is Proactive Monitoring?

• Continuous 24/7 monitoring of your key Salesforce systems helps you predict and prevent issues. Solution performance degradation or errors can be identified as they happen.
• Early warning of critical issues, featuring smart alerts, means your support teams (including Salesforce Premier Support) can swing into action more quickly, solving issues faster and reducing the likelihood that issues become severe.
• Technical guidance from Salesforce experts, based upon best practices learned supporting more than 150,000 customers, can help you restore functionality more quickly, and help reduce the likelihood of future errors and system problems. Once we know what’s wrong, we’ll tell you what you need to do to fix it.

 

It’s not me, it’s you.

So what kind of things are we talking about? Well, we aren’t talking about Lightning Platform issues. If something happens and it affect multiple customers, we already respond fast, clearly, and transparently, on our Trust site — and that’s not going to stop.

Instead, Proactive Monitoring is specifically targeted to your own business use of Salesforce — tailored to your own needs — and to spotting issues before they become problems.

To help us explain this better, we talked to one of our Senior Technical Engineers, Greg Smith, and asked him to tell us about common problems he’s seen and how his team has helped fix them. Greg has 30 years’ experience in IT, is based in Canada (so you know he’s nice, too) and, as a side, note, is fluent in Japanese. Wow.

Here are three examples from our conversation with Greg:

 

Users Reporting Time-Out Errors

“Many user-reported time-out errors or slowdowns are because of your custom code,” Greg said. “Inefficient code means lengthy processing time, slow responses, and then your users can see time-out errors. And then they log a case with your internal support — more wasted time.”

Technical Guidance: If you have Proactive Monitoring, our engineers can see the slowdown and identify code problems as the likely cause. This service doesn’t fix the code, but we’ll diagnose the problem and tell you what you should do next to keep this from happening.

 

Marketing Email Stoppage

“For customers using Marketing Cloud, if automations stop working, then outbound emails may stop working,” said Greg. “They might be running long, not running on schedule, skipping, or stopping altogether. And that means less money coming in from customers.”

Smart Alerts: Rapid response is the most important thing in this case, since any downtime is money lost. With Proactive Monitoring, we tailor your alerts and escalations to your schedule so you get notice of these right away. We’ll tell you what has stopped and recommend how to fix it fast.

 

Performance-Killing Batch Jobs

“Batch jobs that run at inefficient times; too many batches running concurrently; batches that are slowed down or delayed because one batch hangs due to customer code or overly large data files … these are performance killers,” said Greg. “And if your batches don’t run, your sales forecasts might be wrong.”

24/7 Monitoring: If you have Proactive Monitoring our engineers will see the performance problem in real time as it is happening, diagnose it as related to killer batch jobs, and guide you on how to build an intelligent batch schedule that improves performance for all business units, all time zones.

 

Every Salesforce customer journey is unique to that customer, and sometimes includes some bumps along the trail. Proactive Monitoring, tailored to your own use of Salesforce, smooths out the bumps so you can focus on what matters to you: keeping customers happy and loyal, and your business running at speed.

To learn more about Proactive Monitoring, contact your account executive, or watch our webinar on-demand, "Protect Critical Business Processes with 24×7 Proactive Monitoring" — Greg reveals some likely causes of solution performance errors, and provides quick tips to diagnose and fix them.