Admins

Why You Need to Understand Observability in Salesforce: Logs, Alerts, and Monitoring

By Jack McCurdy

Observability might seem like a topic that’s more relevant to developers and architects, but if you’re a Salesforce Admin, you’ll see the real-world impact of changes, errors, and performance issues every day – and you’ll often be the first person a user contacts when something breaks.

As an admin, the health of your org and supporting your users are key concerns. These are the core concerns of observability, too – helping you spot unusual activity fast and take action before it turns into a problem.

In this post, we’ll run through an introduction to what observability is, how many teams have observability tooling in place, and the impact robust observability has on your orgs.

What Is Observability in Salesforce?

Observability means being able to understand what’s happening inside a system based on outputs like logs, events, metrics, and traces. It’s the ability to spot trends and get to the root cause of issues. In Salesforce, that translates to knowing how changes to metadata, data, automations, or configuration affect the behavior and performance of your org.

With observability in place, you’re not just responding to issues – you’re able to ask better questions, spot anomalies early, and trace failures to their root cause. That might mean understanding why a scheduled Flow failed or identifying where a change to a validation rule is blocking a business process.

The Visibility Gap in Salesforce

On lots of platforms, observability is already a mature part of DevOps. But in the Salesforce ecosystem, we’re just beginning to see its value. According to Gearset’s 2025 State of Salesforce DevOps Report (due for release this week), 49% of teams aren’t yet using observability tools at all.

And that gap has consequences. Without observability, most teams still rely on users to report problems. This leaves a serious time lag between discovering and fixing bugs. 74% of teams without observability are only discovering issues when someone raises a ticket.

That reactive model comes at a cost. In 2024, bugs caused a Salesforce outage at 21% of businesses. And when you don’t know what’s changing in your org or how changes are behaving in production, you’re left trying to work backwards from symptoms to the root cause.

By contrast, teams that do have observability tools in place are 50% more likely to catch bugs within a day and 48% more likely to fix them just as quickly. That’s time saved, but also trust preserved.

Trend Spotting: More Than Just Logs and Alerts

Good observability shouldn’t drown you in data. It should be building a picture of your org health over time. That includes tracking longer-term trends that can point to deeper, systemic issues in your pipeline or architecture.

For admins, this could look like:

  • A rising number of Flow failures in specific business processes
  • Repeated Apex exceptions thrown by unmanaged code or legacy packages
  • Permission errors spiking after role hierarchy changes
  • Performance bottlenecks introduced by new automations or triggers
  • User behavior signals such as drop-off in Lightning page performance or reports timing out

With the right data, these become opportunities to intervene early, simplify complex areas, and prevent future issues from surfacing in production.

From Reactive to Proactive

One of the biggest wins observability offers is the ability to move from firefighting to prevention. When you have visibility into your org’s performance and changes over time, you can spot fragile areas before they break. You might start by identifying areas with high change frequency and low test coverage. Or flag deployments that introduce large metadata deltas without corresponding test suite updates.

Over time, you can build a feedback loop that helps you:

  • Prioritize fragile flows or processes for refactoring
  • Highlight high-risk metadata types (like profiles, validation rules, or sharing settings) that need tighter control
  • Correlate deployment failures with gaps in version control or branching strategy
  • Spot bottlenecks in your release cadence – are weekend deployments masking failure patterns that only show up on Monday?

The more observability you build in, the more you can shift left and enhance user stability, empowering admins to focus less on retroactively fixing issues and more on proactively improving system performance and resilience.

Summary

Salesforce Admins are the first responders to issues, champions of efficiency, and gatekeepers of system health. Embracing observability helps you gain the insight needed to safeguard your users and systems from the unknown. By moving from a reactive stance to a proactive approach, observability empowers admins to detect issues before they escalate, streamline operations, and build trust in releases.

As the Salesforce ecosystem matures, observability is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s a must-have for admins who want to drive stability and performance.

The Author

Jack McCurdy

Jack is a Salesforce DevOps Advocate for Gearset, the leading DevOps solution for Salesforce.

Leave a Reply