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Spring 21 Salesforce Devops

Salesforce Devops in Spring ’22 Release

Devops-related product releases from Salesforce are far and few between, but there is some devops joy in the Salesforce Spring ’22 Release. While Salesforce DevOps Center is conspicuous by its absence, Performance Assistant makes its debut as a pilot tool for analyzing Salesforce app performance and resource utilization.

Performance Assistant Pilot

Salesforce orgs that wish to improve the core performance of their applications may sign up for the pilot version of Performance Assistant in the Salesforce Spring ’22 Release. Contact your Account Executive to sign up. Performance Assistant seems to be a combination of training and using special templates to organize a testing regime designed to test performance tweaks.

Performance Assistant addresses a common problem in Salesforce, which is not knowing how resources are being consumed. It is designed to deal with high-capacity applications choices such as dealing with governor limits and Salesforce platform limitations. Also, without adequate logging and analysis, users can chew up external API call resources.

According to a Dreamforce 2021 broadcast available on Salesforce+, Performance Assistant is a suite of opinionated tools designed to help architects scale applications. Performance Assistant is a platform framework that lets owners plan, execute, and then analyze and optimize the results of performance testing regimes. This Dreamforce session mentioned Scale Center in conjunction with Performance Assistant. But I believe the functions of Scale Center have been folder into Performance Assistant.

Scant Observability in Salesforce

The introduction of Performance Assistant is a welcome addition to Salesforce. It makes up for a huge lack of visibility into how well Salesforce applications perform. This includes understanding how digital products are being used and how to optimize their usage.

Observability is the process of instrumenting, emitting, and analyzing raw performance data from an application. Instrumenting refers to installing signaling code that is invoked during certain events. The signaling code then emits a log entry, which is subsequently analyzed. Salesforce is already instrumented for system-wide exceptions, like Apex error messages. But higher-level application activity metrics are generally unavailable in Salesforce.

Let us hope for more observability and monitoring tools to be introduced to the Salesforce ecosystem soon. One Salesforce-specific independent software vendor, Pharos, currently offers a platform for observing and managing errors emitted from custom applications. And more cloud native observability and application performance monitoring companies like Datadog should soon offer better Salesforce integrations in 2022.