New alerting features in Gearset's Salesforce metadata monitoring

The flexibility of the Salesforce platform encourages change, allowing power users, admins and developers to easily tweak things as needed. As a company that builds a release management service, we encourage people to follow good development practices and ensure that changes are properly documented and audited so you can understand later why they were made! However, forcing every change through a software development lifecycle, even an Agile one, would be sacrificing the power of the platform and the clicks-not-code culture that allows organisations to make rapid change to their orgs as the business requires. After all, adding a simple picklist value doesn’t carry the same risk as 10,000 new lines of Apex or addition of AppExchange packages.

So how do you ensure that changes made directly in production by admins and power users aren’t forgotten about and are properly captured and audited? That’s where Gearset’s change monitoring comes in. This was the first feature that we added to Gearset Enterprise, and it’s now trusted by thousands of businesses to allow their Salesforce teams to properly capture every change, without compromising their ability to blaze a trail.

A quick refresher on how Gearset’s change monitoring works:

Step 1: Add one of your Salesforce orgs

Step 2: Tell Gearset which metadata you’d like to have monitored

Step 3: Tell Gearset how you’d like to be notified

That’s it! Gearset will now take a daily backup of your metadata. Each day, Gearset will notify you of any of the changse that anyone on the team has made. You’ll also be able to:

1. Roll a change back easily if it wasn’t authorised or was made in error
2. Deploy that change from your production org back to development environments or source control

Now with Microsoft Teams support

In step 3 above, you may have noticed the option to add a Microsoft Teams URL. Gearset surfaces change alerts wherever your team hangs out. For many people, that place is email and Chatter but there are other popular communication and collaboration services - Slack, for instance, has seen tremendous adoption within organisations, and we’ve added support for it in Gearset accordingly. Microsft have recently released the Teams product as part of Office 365. Teams is a real-time chat app with heavy integration into the Microsoft ecosystem, allowing users to create threaded conversations around Office documents and even schedule meetings right from the chat interface. Gearset now integrates with Teams, so if it’s where your team hangs out, we’ll make sure no change to production goes unnoticed.

To set it up, just:

1. Locate the channel you want Gearset to send a message to
2. Select Connectors from the dropdown and add an Incoming webhook
3. Add that URL to any Gearset’s metadata monitoring, test monitoring or continuous integration jobs

Free trial

To keep a close eye on your metadata and have the choice to roll back any rogue deployments at the click of a button, sign up for your free 30-day trial with Gearset now.