Sometimes, working with your tech stack can feel like setting up an intricate chain of dominoes. If the conditions are optimal, everything is safe. But the second a breeze comes through, you get startled, or you put one domino too close to another, one domino gets nudged, and the whole thing goes down.
This domino effect can cause a serious ripple of negative impacts throughout your sales, marketing, and CX teams, hurting your whole go-to-market force. Suddenly, reports start breaking, automations stop working… It’s giving us nightmares just thinking about it.
When things like this happen, it’s up to your mighty ops team to reverse-engineer the problem—find out what went wrong and where, fix it, and ensure it never happens again. But if you’re reading this blog post, you know that’s easier said than done.
The impacts even the smallest break can cause
When something breaks, it doesn’t have to be caused by a huge error. A small typo or an extra space in a picklist value is the cause of many tech stack breaks, leading to ripple effects like:
- Broken validation rules
- Inaccurate reports
- Silent data loss
- Inefficient processes
- Misfired APIs
- Broken integrations
Finding every issue the break is causing is one thing—finding the cause of the break is a harder thing altogether.
Make reverse engineering a break easier with a Change Intelligence platform
Sometimes, searching for the source of your problem can make you feel a bit like Sherlock Holmes—except, my dear Watson, it’s not elementary at all. But with a Change Intelligence platform, you’ll solve the mystery in no time.
Using a Change Intelligence platform like Sonar takes the hard work out of reverse engineering:
- See the before-state of any change so you can find the cause of an issue and get everything working again right away. It doesn’t matter if the change happened two hours ago or two months ago, you can see a complete history of every change, who made it, and when. No surprises here!
- Track every addition, subtraction, and change with daily updates about your Salesforce org via Slack. It’s essentially a TL;DR version of your complete change history, or Sonar Timelines, that we covered above. You can now take advantage of the quick, asynchronous communication Slack provides with your Sonar change summaries.
- See how processes are designed and how data is referenced across all of your systems. This way, everyone can visualize the impact of a change before it happens. You can see a living blueprint of your tech stack which shows you the relationship between your fields, automations, reports, and more. No more hours wasted scoping and documenting changes.
- Discover broken validation rules immediately so you can resolve them before they lead to silent data loss. Much of reverse engineering feels like stressful, reactive work, but with our Potential Issues feature, you can proactively fix issues before they cause any kind of domino effect. This makes for a happier you, a stress-free ops team, and a stronger process.
How Sonar helps other ops teams reverse-engineer breaks
No one likes a mysterious error in Salesforce, and Briq’s RevOps manager, Nic, unfortunately, experienced one of these mysteries firsthand. He received an email with this error:
Error occurred during flow… Apex CPU time limit exceeded.
Confused? Nic was too. As a seasoned RevOps pro, he noted that the process appeared to be running in his Salesforce org, but the impacted process hadn’t been modified in days. Within Salesforce, the error message said it was started by his integration user. Another clue… maybe it was something coming from another tool, but what?
Turning to Sonar was Nic’s immediate next step. With our Timeline feature, Nic took a look at the day the error began in order to see what may have changed. All of the changes listed wouldn’t have caused any issues, so that was Nic’s next clue that the issue wasn’t in Salesforce, but something connected to it, instead.
That knowledge helped Nic identify the issue faster since Sonar supported his gut feeling that the issue was something connected and sending data to Salesforce. Without Sonar’s help, Nic would have taken significantly longer to dig through his org’s Process Builders and Flows manually, and more errors could have stacked up in the meantime.
Start tackling breaks with confidence today
Find out how Sonar can save you valuable time finding and reverse-engineering errors in your tech stack. Try us for free today.