Event Monitoring

Salesforce handles vast amounts of data and user activity, making it crucial to understand what's happening within the system. Without proper oversight, administrators might overlook critical incidents, such as:

Unusual User Activity – bulk logins, hacking attempts, large data downloads.
Integration and Automation Errors – API request failures, unexpected transaction rollbacks.
Performance Degradation – slow queries, delayed reports, slow-loading pages.
Unauthorized Data Changes – bulk updates or deletions of records.

Event Monitoring

To minimize these risks, Salesforce offers Event Monitoring, enabling administrators and security specialists to collect, store, and analyze user, admin, and integration process activities. This tool allows organizations to track critical activities, identify anomalies, and respond promptly.

Event Monitoring tracks events such as:

Viewing or exporting reports and data (Report Exports)
Authentication and login attempts (Login Events)
Data modifications (Data Changes)
Usage of REST, SOAP, and Bulk APIs (API Requests)
Lightning page performance (Lightning Performance Events)

All events are logged into Event Log Files, which can be exported and analyzed. Note that these logs are stored temporarily: 30 days by default, though this can be extended for Event Monitoring Analytics subscribers. In Developer Edition environments, logs are stored for only 1 day.

Real-Time Event Monitoring

Besides standard Event Monitoring, Salesforce also provides Real-Time Event Monitoring, allowing real-time event tracking and automation setup based on these events. Real-Time Event Monitoring is crucial for ensuring reliability and security, enabling rapid responses to incidents.

Real-Time Event Monitoring Supports:

Automatic alerts for anomaly detection.
Event handling via Streaming API (integratable with SIEM systems like Splunk, QRadar, ELK, etc.).
Creating Transaction Security Policies to automatically block suspicious actions.

Real-Time Event Monitoring Examples:

Intrusion Detection – identifying a single user logging in from multiple countries.
Tracking Data Downloads – administrator downloading a large volume of files quickly.
Attack Response – high volume of API requests within a short time.

Important: Real-Time Event Monitoring is available exclusively through Salesforce Shield.

Learning Resources

Salesforce provides relevant Trailheads:

Usage of Event Monitoring

Export Logs via API and Salesforce UI Finding Event Monitoring Logs:

Navigate to Setup -> Event Log File Browser
Select desired events and download CSV reports

Automatic export using Salesforce CLI:

sf data query -o my-org -q "SELECT EventType, LogDate FROM EventLogFile"

Set Up Automatic Alerts and Real-Time Monitoring

With Real-Time Event Monitoring, automated responses to events can be configured.

Transaction Security Policy Example:

Go to Setup -> Transaction Security Policies
Choose rule creation method: Clicks or Code? (visual Condition Builder or Apex code)
Create a rule (e.g., "Block downloads exceeding 1000 records at once")
Set up an action: alert an admin or block the action