A Salesforce Architect’s goal has always been to design scalable, future proof solutions. But that’s no longer a goal exclusive to architects, also developers, and other roles that involve building on the Salesforce platform – everybody can be a performance engineer.
When designing solutions for your Salesforce org, you’ll find there are a number of options to design any given solution, so it’s critical to take all factors into consideration – including the impact on performance and scalability. But, while assessing your current (and future) needs, how can you know which resources are being consumed, and at the same time, be confident that performance won’t suffer with increased complexity to your apps?
This is where Salesforce’s Scale Center comes into action. Now generally available, this provides self-service and near real-time access to performance metrics. Part of Performance Assistant, Scale Center has been teased for over a year, during which you could only get access via a request to your Salesforce Account Executive (AE).
Let’s take a look at Scale Center’s core features, availability, and how to get started.
What is Salesforce Scale Center?
Scale Center guides those building on the Salesforce platform in deploying scalable apps. In practice, this is all about being proactive in building to avoid any performance and usability degradation – in other words, the speed your org can operate at when users perform their work.
Salesforce Scale Center…
- Provides self-service and near real-time access to performance metrics to improve the scalability of your Salesforce implementation – including spikes in database calls, user logins, and errors.
- Retrieves customized insights and recommendations.
- Diagnoses root causes (‘hot spots’), and enables you to act on issues earlier in your development cycle (before you deploy and need to regress).
- Launches analysis to troubleshoot errors.
Scale Center is useful across the development lifecycle, when preparing for deployment to production (performance testing in sandboxes), assessing post-deployment impact, and peak time analysis for proactive monitoring.
Org Performance – Overview
Within the Org Performance page, find charts that measure database calls, user logins, and errors, all measured per 10 minutes. You could compare this to taking a pulse of your Salesforce org’s vital health indicators.
Spikes in any of these indicators are easy to see, visually. To dig deeper into a spike, you can highlight any time period, and launch an analysis report, for example, Database Performance, Apex Summary, Flow Performance, Governor Limits, and more:
Org Performance – Time Periods
In Org Performance, you can also compare two time periods, the base time range, and the comparison time range (i.e. start and end time A, and start and end time B).
Generating the comparison gives you a snapshot of key performance metrics, and the increase/decrease of each:
Performance Analysis
Reports generated from the Org Performance page are accessed on the Performance Analysis page, including the analysis type, requestor, date the request was made, and the start and end points of the analysis window.
Opening up a report, you can see:
- A trail of the SOQL queries that have contributed to the increased database consumption (top-right).
- A breakdown of the record types accountable for database calls (both actual counts and % of the total).
- The top entry points.
- The users who have caused the database spike.
In combination, these components are powerful to narrow down the root cause of the database consumption spike.
Performance Assistant
We mentioned in the opening that Scale Center is part of Performance Assistant. While they go hand in hand, they are separate offerings.
- Performance Assistant is a step-by-step journey, broken down into three sections: Prepare, Execute, and Analyze & Optimize. This is a higher level, broader overview to analyze your org, which would be most used by Salesforce Architects, or similar.
- Scale Center is designed to give a single consolidated view that helps you continually identify issues, diagnose, and analyze those specific results.
Enable Salesforce Scale Center
The process to enable Scale Center is easy, requiring a few steps as outlined here.
Once enabled, you can use Scale Center in your production org, and any full-copy sandboxes.
Summary
With Salesforce Scale Center now generally available, everyone who builds on the Salesforce Platform can now be a performance engineer. It provides near real-time access to performance metrics, customized insights, analysis to troubleshoot errors, and more. This tool will help improve the scalability of your Salesforce implementation, as well as the speed your org can operate at.
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