Gearset’s change monitoring feature gives you confidence that any changes made directly in your production instances will be easily detected and captured, so that you can propagate those changes back to development and staging environments and make sure they don’t get lost. Even better, if you discover some unexpected changes that you’d prefer got lost, Gearset offers simple, instant rollback to reverse those changes.
The change monitoring feature also doubles as a backup tool. For any change monitoring job, you can view a list of every daily snapshot Gearset has taken, and download a copy the metadata as it was on that day.
Snapshots are stored indefinitely. If I want to, I can drill right back to New Year’s Eve in 2015 and see what state my production org was in:
All these workflows are gaining an additional benefit today: the ability to kick off a snapshot whenever you want, rather than having to wait for the job’s daily scheduled run.
Introducing on-demand snapshots
The change monitor overview page now includes a new Run job now button next to each change monitor, which will be enabled as soon as the monitor has run its first daily job:
Clicking Run job now will trigger the monitor to run - creating a new snapshot, and comparing it to the previous snapshot to tell you what’s changed. You can monitor the status of the running job on the overview page. Once the job is finished, the table will refresh and you’ll see the change monitor’s new status.
This new functionality unlocks a lot of useful possibilities:
Run your change monitor after you’ve made changes in production
One of Salesforce’s benefits is that you can fix things up right in production, without going through a full deployment cycle. If you’ve just made a quick fix in production, and you want to make sure you know exactly what you changed so that you can propagate those changes to other environments, you can just run the change monitor once you’re finished. You’ll get a summary of everything you just changed, without having to wait for the nightly run.
Run your change monitor before a deployment
If you want some extra peace of mind during a risky release, you can run your change monitor straight before you kick off the deployment. This accomplishes two things:
- It gives you a backup of the state of the org before the deployment (although with Gearset’s deployment rollback feature, you won’t need it)
- It lets you ensure that nobody has changed anything in production since the last time the change monitor ran which might interfere with, or get overwritten by, your deployment
Run your change monitor after a deployment
Once you’ve pushed your deployment out, you might want to run the monitor manually to capture the state of the org straight after deployment. The benefit of this is that changes made in your deployment and any changes made later on in the day won’t be tangled into the same comparison, so they’ll be easier to understand.
We really hope you find the additions useful - if we’re missing something that you’d like to see, then just pop a suggestion on our feedback forum, or fire us an email!