Flow Audit Overview

Welcome to Salesforce Flow Audits.  After reading this article, you will be able to 

• Describe how SightLane Flow Auditing works
• Describe the SightLane Flow components and what they do
• Add enhanced visibility to any Salesforce Flow

Why Audit Flows?

Although Salesforce has simplified Flow building with drag-and-drop components, simple editors, and lots of educational resources, the business processes we design with Flows can still be super complex.  The logic of a Flow and the decisions it makes have a big impact on users and on the types of errors that can occur.

Consider a Flow-based custom billing process or a new user provisioning procedure.  Understanding what decisions are being made by the flow and why they are critical to answering Users' questions and remediating unexpected issues quickly.  Without visibility into those decisions, we are stuck guessing and researching our way, hoping to find an answer.   Fortunately, SightLane can help.

Auditing Flows with SightLane

SightLane provides Salesforce developers with 5 separate drag-and-drop components to help monitor and document Salesforce Flow decisions and outcomes.  SightLane Flow audits can be created with just 3 steps (all of which occur within the standard Flow Builder interface).

1. Create a Log Collection
2. Use SightLane Components
3. Add Logging as Needed

The best part is that once a Flow audit is created, it lives in the Flow, so there are no additional preparation or deployment steps. Flow audits work in every environment, whether production or sandbox. Notifications and other decisions about audit handling are made through the SightLane point-and-click interface, so Flow builders can stay focused on what they already do best: bringing business processes to life!

Step 1: Create a Log Collection 

Creating a log collection is as easy as adding a new String List variable to your Flow.  As your flow progresses, this collection resource will hold all of your Flow documentation until it is time to report your findings to SightLane through the SightLane Flow components.

Step 2: Use SightLane Components

The SightLane toolbox consists of five separate components, each helping with documentation of various Flow situations. In this article, we will name and describe each component briefly, but please consult additional articles in this section for detailed information on all Flow Audit components and specific, step-by-step examples.

The components are listed below in roughly the order of their popularity and use.  The purpose of this section is just to give an overview and basic definition, so don't worry if you don't get it all at once.  There are lots of examples in the other articles in this section.  You'll be adding Flow visibility in no time!

Component 1 - Report an Event to SightLane

This component is responsible for documenting the details (logs) from a specific execution of the flow process (in SightLane, we call this an "Event").  Every time the Flow is executed, this component will capture not only your documentation content, but also the what? when? and who? of the execution.

Component 2 - Log Record Data

This component is used to document the state of any record that is in scope of the flow.  Want to document the current attribute values of the Opportunity object at this point in the flow (This would be a lot of properties!), simply set a few component properties and you will get all the documentation you need.

Component 3 - Report Event Failure to SightLane

This component also documents audit details from each execution of the Flow, but it is used in scenarios where the flow failed or behaved unexpectedly. Because it deals with errors, it has a few different properties than the "Report an Event" component. For more information, check out the "Flow Failures" article in this section.

Pro Tip: When SightLane Auto Capture is enabled, this component can often be rendered unnecessary.  Unexpected failures will be automatically captured by SightLane, without you having to do anything.  More on this in the Flow Failures article.

Component 4 - Begin a New Monitor Event

This component creates and initializes a brand new monitoring event.  This is sometimes necessary in situations when Flows and Apex code are mixed into a single process or across transactions.  Those situations are a bit more advanced and will be covered in additional articles.

Component 5 - Add Content to the Current Monitor Event

Like the "Begin New Monitor" component, this component is used to address sophisticated scenarios in which Apex and Flows are calling each other.  It's a little beyond the scope of this article, but it's nice to know that no matter how complicated your implementation is, SightLane has a component for that! :)

Step 3: Add Logging Content

Now that you've added the resource and the right reporting components, it's time to fill in the details.  Use as much or as little logging as you'd like based on your visibility goals.  The best part is that you don't have to learn any new skills to create amazing monitoring content.  Just use your existing assignment statements (or add new ones) to add meaningful content to your Flow audit content along the way.

Secret step four is enjoying your newfound visibility and power! With just these few steps, you can create meaningful Flow auditing content that will help your team identify and respond to issues much faster, saving you time every day!  Now that we've seen the overview steps, let's dive into some of the finer details!

Summary

Flow Auditing uses your existing Flow skills to create powerful visibility content with each event.  In this article, we gave an overview of the process.  Over the next few articles, we will explore the individual SightLane components that are used to design powerful visibility, even in your most complex processes.