As a salesforce Admin, there is no doubt you’ve heard about (or even lived through) horror stories associated with Orgs that had too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many undocumented changes without enough change notifications, which most likely resulted in people stepping on each other’s toes. Or, at the very least, laid the groundwork for an interesting discussion about compliance and change monitoring.
We get it, sometimes a rapid change cycle is needed in order to meet the needs of the business enterprise. However, sacrificing change monitoring is never the answer. Fortunately, Metazoa Snapshot was designed specifically for this purpose.
This short blog post will discuss some of the amazing features built into Metazoa Snapshot that will enable you to manage changes like a pro: Automated snapshots, Org monitoring and Org documentation reports.
Automated snapshots:
When you create a snapshot, also known as a metadata backup, you are downloading a picture of your Org’s schema and the metadata that make up its configuration. This offline, timestamped snapshot gives you the ability to visualize how the Org is structured at that very specific point in time. This backup also gives you the flexibility to see and compare the changes made to the Org over time. You can even compare the Org against other Orgs.
Depending on the size of your Org, and your time availability, it might be prudent to schedule this process after business hours. Think 1:00 AM, when everyone is logged off the system.
To facilitate that pre-dawn run (and to let you stay in bed when you don’t need to be at your computer), you can schedule an automated backup. You can even decide its frequency. Typical production snapshots are executed weekly, but can be daily or every 12 hours – in the cases of a rapid innovation and release cycles.
You can even rely on these backups to restore metadata. Picture bringing back yesterday’s class or last week’s validation rule, but that’s a topic for another discussion…
Org monitoring:
Another great thing about automated snapshots is that they send out “New Snapshot” events once completed. “Why should I care,” you ask? Because you can hook onto these New Snapshot events to run automated Time Series reports. A Time Series report compares snapshots taken for the same Org, helping you identify changes that were made over time. You can even export the changes made to Excel, HTML, PDF or CSV. Translation: Org monitoring and change notification!
Imagine receiving a document over email that lists out changes made to your Profiles, Objects, Workflows, Apex Classes (and whatever else), along with who made those changes over the last “X” number of days. No more surprises, and more evidence-based conversations for your daily standup meetings.
Another wonderful thing about Time Series reports is that you can go back in time and document all the changes made to an Org over the last month, quarter or year for your auditor. You can showcase that you know what you are doing by keeping track of Org changes, and the auditor can see it immediately in those reports.
Org documentation:
To help complete the picture, along with Time Series reports, you can also create Org documentation. Snapshot helps you automatically generate a Data Dictionary for your Org. This Data Dictionary can help you see objects, the fields they are part of them, and their picklist values. And finally, to cap it all off, you can even see the details about where those objects and fields are being used. As your Org changes, this translates to automatic administrator reference and compliance documentation.
Let Snapshot take care of all the grunt work, so you can focus on what you do best – delivering innovation.
If you need help setting up these reports, please click here.
For more detail, check out our Org Monitoring white paper.
Congratulations! 