Gearset has extended the scope of the observability of Salesforce applications it provides to include software developed using low-code Flex and object-oriented Apex programming tools.
Busayo Longe, a product manager for Gearset, said Flow is gaining more traction as a tool that is more widely employed to build Salesforce applications, while more complex applications are typically built using Apex.
Gearset, a provider of a DevOps platform for Salesforce applications, is now able to surface and analyze Flow and Apex errors in real time.
Unlike other applications where issues are surfaced using alerts generated via agents embedded in an application, the Salesforce platform generates automated error emails whenever there is a failure. It’s then up to the IT team managing these applications to investigate the root cause.
As a result, IT teams can find themselves being inundated with a high volume of hard-to-interpret messages that lack context about what went wrong, who was affected, or how urgent the issue is.
In addition to providing that context, Gearset errors can be filtered by type and further investigated using a set of visualization tools provided.
IT teams can also configure the automated error emails generated by the Salesforce platform to be automatically routed to Slack or Microsoft Teams messaging platforms if they prefer.
Finally, the alerts generated by Salesforce can also be customized to enable IT teams to only be notified when an issue exceeds a specific threshold.
In general, the need for observability will become much more pronounced as more organizations build and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) agents on the platform. As the interactions between AI agents increase, the chances that there will be issues that IT teams will need to investigate will only continue to increase, noted Longe.
The challenge is that a recent Gearset survey finds 69% of the IT teams managing Salesforce applications don’t have access to an observability platform. According to Gearset, IT teams that have access to an observability platform are 50% more likely to catch bugs within a day and 48% more likely to fix them within a day, compared to teams without these tools. On the plus side, 81% of respondents said they have adopted a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform. In fact, Gearset claims it added 800 new customers in 2024, bringing its total customer count to 2,900 organizations.
It’s not clear who is building the bulk of the applications deployed on the Salesforce platform. While there are a large number of so-called citizen developers building applications using low-code tools, many enterprises also rely on professional developers to build these applications. As a result, the quality of the applications deployed on a Salesforce platform can vary widely. The one certain thing is that the pace at which organizations are building custom applications that are deployed on the Salesforce platform only continues to accelerate.
The challenge that arises is that the Salesforce platform is based on a proprietary, unique mix of programming languages, formats and metadata that require a separate set of DevOps tools and platforms to manage application development and deployment.
Regardless of who or how Salesforce applications are developed, the one certain thing is that it will eventually fall to a DevOps team to troubleshoot them whenever an issue arises.
