Alerts and wrapping the series about monitoring on Salesforce.com

25.09.2025 — monitoring, salesforce — 3 min read

This is a part of series of blog posts about advanced monitoring techniques for your Salesforce.com application so your business can rely on the tech team.

So far, we've covered:

We've now got Prometheus integrated with Salesforce and we can collect metrics. This is a journey and we've just begun it.

We started off with trying to understand the need for enabling a better monitoring on your Salesforce org. We then looked at a simple way of sending alerts to a Slack channel.

Then we looked at why this isn't enough and why we need to have a proper monitoring system. There are lots of tools and systems that do that, but we chose Prometheus as an example. We then installed it on Heroku and built a simple API in Salesforce that exposes metrics. Finally, we integrated them and got to collect metrics.

Prometheus comes with Alert Manager and we can use that to send alerts to Slack. We can also extend it to send alerts to other systems like PagerDuty or your in-house Incident Management system.

Alerts in Prometheus

Alerts in Prometheus are configured in the prometheus.yml file. We can define a set of rules that are evaluated against the metrics and if they match, an alert is fired. The alert is then sent to the Alert Manager which can then be configured to send it to Slack or other systems.

Let's take a look at an example:

groups:
- name: example
  rules:

  # Alert when no new accounts are created in the last 30 minutes.
  - alert: NoNewAccounts
    expr: increase(sfdc_accounts_created[30m]) == 0
    for: 30m
    labels:
      severity: high
    annotations:
      summary: "No new accounts created in the last 30 minutes"
      description: "No new accounts created in the last 30 minutes"

  # Alert when daily API requests are more than 90% of the limit.
  - alert: DailyApiRequestsHigh
    expr: (sfdc_limits_dailyapirequests_current / sfdc_limits_dailyapirequests_max) > 0.8
    for: 5m
    labels:
      severity: high
    annotations:
      summary: "Daily API requests are more than 90% of the limit"
      description: "Daily API requests are more than 90% of the limit"

The first alert assumes that we have the metric sfdc_accounts_created. That is, account creation metrics needed to be sent to Prometheus. It uses the increase function to calculate how many new accounts were created in the last 30 minutes and fires an alert if there are none.

The second alert uses the metrics we've already setup to check if the daily API requests are more than 80% of the limit.

As we can see, Prometheus's query language allows to build some complex rules to alert on.

Alert Manager

The Alert Manager can send these alerts to any of the configured systems. It is configured using another yml file and here's a small configuration to send alerts to Slack:

global:
  # Also possible to place this URL in a file.
  # Ex: `slack_api_url_file: '/etc/alertmanager/slack_url'`
  slack_api_url: '<slack_webhook_url>'

route:
  receiver: 'slack-notifications'
  group_by: [alertname, datacenter, app]

receivers:
- name: 'slack-notifications'
  slack_configs:
  - channel: '#alerts-salesforce'
    text: 'Notification for {{ .GroupLabels.app }}/{{ .GroupLabels.alertname }}. Please check!'

Conclusion

That's it! We now have a complete monitoring system for our Salesforce org, that shows us graphs that can be put on a monitor for your team to look at frequently, and a great alerting system that can be configured to send alerts to where your team can check them.

There are more tools that can be used to build a monitoring system, and I'll keep reviewing this series as I learn more about them.