Achieving Operational Excellence: Ways to Monitor Salesforce Marketing Cloud- Part 2

This is the second post in the Ways to Monitor Salesforce Marketing Cloud Series. The first post, which gives an overview and talks about salesforce notifications can be accessed here.

In this post, we will see several ways you can proactively monitor your SFMC org.

Proactive Monitoring: 

Proactive Monitoring involves actively tracking the database, monitoring the behavior of business processes, and staying informed about changes happening within your Salesforce Marketing Cloud organization.

Here are a few methods you can employ for proactive monitoring:

Metrics dashboard in SFMC setup:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides a metrics dashboard in the setup that offers valuable insights into your account. The dashboard includes the following components:

1. Journeys - This graph displays the number and statuses of journeys in your account 
2. Automation - The graph presents the number and statuses of automation from the last seven days, providing visibility into their execution. You can also download the automation history for further analysis.
3. Data Extensions - This number represents the total count of data extensions in your account, and you can download storage details for each data extension
4. Content -This number indicates the total count of content pieces in your account, including shared assets. 
5. Users - This number shows the total count of users in your account, with business units displaying the assigned users specific to each unit. 

Database Tracking:

Here are some insights and guidelines to optimize your database tracking in Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

• Primary Keys and Indexing: Salesforce indexes primary keys but having too many primary keys can slow down inserts into a data extension. Primary keys, sendable relationship fields, and other frequently used fields are indexed automatically for improved performance.
• Row Width: It is advisable to keep the row width within 4000 characters. (reference) 
• Let's examine some key considerations from Salesforce's documentation here that indicate the optimal operation, can encounter potential performance issues, and significant degradation for various entities as below.

Entity	optimal operation	can encounter potential performance issues	significant degradation
Concurrent Imports to a Data Extension	1	2	3 or more
Concurrent Imports to Lists	1	2	3 or more
Data Extensions in an Account	0-1000	1000-10000	>10000
Enterprise 2.0 Business Units	0-1000	1000-2000	>2000
Import and Filter Definitions	0-1000	1000-2000	>2000
Lists and Groups in an Account	0-1000	1000-10000	>10000
Objects in a Folder	0-1000	1000-2000	>2000
Profile Attributes	0-50	50-100	>100
Profile Attributes in an Enterprise 2.0 Account	0-50	50-100	>100
Profile Attributes in an On-Your-Behalf or Lock-and-Publish Account	0-50	50-100	>100
Profile Attributes Included in an Account or Business Unit Filter Definition	1-2	3-5	6 or more
Rows in a Data Extension	0-1 million	1 million to 100 million	>100 million
Sender Profiles	0-50	50-100	>100
Subscribers	0-2 million	2 million to 10 million	>10 million
Users	0-1000	1000-2000	>2000

• One important consideration is even some entities together in an aggressive state can cause significant degradation when they are being used together.
• To understand the data extension performance by sizes, there is an exceptional answer by Gortonington here on the sizes of data extensions. 
• According to Gortonington's answer on data extension sizes, it is important to note the following thresholds:

• Data extensions larger than 1 gigabyte may experience slight slowdowns.
• Data extensions larger than 5 gigabytes are likely to experience significant performance degradation.
• Data extensions larger than 10 gigabytes may become unusable within the platform.
• If you require a data extension of ten gigabytes or larger, consider implementing a relational system that separates attributes or records into manageable chunks instead of storing them all in a specific location.

Monitoring Data extensions:

• Data extension sizes can be downloaded manually from time to time from the metrics dashboard described above. 
• If looking to understand trends in data volumes, you can employ something like here.
• An audit trail (details below) can help in identifying parallel imports to data extensions.

Automation Dashboard:

Understanding trends in automation failures can help in further optimizing the same. To do this automation history can be downloaded from the metrics dashboard above. This gives you predefined metrics. A customized Automation dashboard can also be built to get specific metrics as here.

Auditing changes to your org:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides Audit Trail functionality, which helps to view access and activity records. Audit Trail records can be obtained through Marketing Cloud Automation Studio data extracts or REST API extracts. This can be enabled in the setup.

Please note that Audit Trail data is only available after enabling it, and data logged before enabling will not be accessible. There are two levels of Audit Trail available: Basic Audit Trail and Advanced Audit Trail. 

Basic Audit Trail: 

Basic Audit Trail is accessible to all Marketing Cloud customers and includes standard audit capabilities. It covers events such as user authentication, IP addresses, changes to users, user permissions, roles, security settings, logins, password changes, and logouts. Basic Audit Trail retains data for 30 days.

Advanced Audit Trail: 

Advanced Audit Trail provides additional capabilities and requires activation through your account executive. It includes all events covered in Basic Audit Trail, as well as user agents, session IDs, changes to business units, edits to email content, data extension imports and exports, CloudPages content, and collections management, MobilePush message edits, MobileConnect SMS content edits, Google Analytics configuration updates, and Automation Studio events. Advanced Audit Trail retains data for 60 days.

Journey Builder also provides an API endpoint by which you can audit changes to a journey. Refer SFMC REST API document for details.

Salesforce proactive monitoring support:

The Signature Success Plan from Salesforce includes Proactive Services and Smart Alerts, which provide real-time notifications about inefficiencies, performance issues, and errors in custom Salesforce solutions. The Smart Alerts cover various areas, such as API, data, automation, email, mobile, Journey Builder, and Marketing Cloud Connector. Each Smart Alert is designed to address specific business impacts and provide proactive insights to help diagnose and resolve underlying causes.

For example,

1.  The API Lockout alert notifies when users or functions encounter login errors, and the Proactive Monitoring team can assist in diagnosing and unlocking users. 
2. The Email Zero Sends alert ensures that marketing emails are sent to more than zero subscribers.

For a complete Catalog refer to this knowledge article.

In the upcoming post, we will explore various methods and approaches for alerting and monitoring errors or issues.