Field History Tracking vs Setup Audit Trail: Monitoring Changes in Salesforce

field audit trail salesforce

Depending on your unique business needs, engaging with either or both can maximize your ROI. Additionally, Field History Tracking only records changes from the time it’s enabled onward — which can be a problem if you aren’t taking time to determine what’s in scope ahead of time. As opposed to the typical per-user, per-month pricing, Shield pricing is calculated as a percentage of your total Salesforce spend, making it a fairer pricing model for small to medium organizations.

Learning Objectives

Salesforce Shield is an advanced security suite designed to provide enhanced protection, monitoring, and data retention for organizations using Salesforce. It is specifically tailored to meet the complex security and compliance requirements of businesses handling sensitive data in the cloud. Salesforce Shield Field Audit Trail is designed to enhance the visibility and accountability of changes made to data within Salesforce. This feature extends the standard field history tracking capabilities, enabling organizations to retain a comprehensive audit trail of field changes over an extended period. This is crucial for compliance, forensic analysis, and maintaining the integrity of critical business data.

Salesforce Shield Field Audit Trail

Clicking this button will download the key to your local computer as a text file. Store this key in a secure location, where you will be able to find it but others won’t. Given that the Shield suite is all about protecting your data, it makes sense that one of the first things you should do is identify what needs to be focused on. That’s why Data Detect works hand-in-hand with platform encryption, informing what needs to be encrypted “at rest”.

Setup Audit Trail: Keep Track of Metadata Changes in Salesforce

  • All of these events are tracked and accessible via the API, so you can view them in the data visualization app of your choice.
  • This allows any records containing “San Diego” to be matched when using filtering capabilities.
  • If you rely solely on native recovery, Salesforce’s paid data recovery service costs $10,000 per request, takes weeks, and does not guarantee complete recovery.
  • For example, you will be able to see if an Apex Class has been created, changed, or deleted, but that’s about it.

We also have integrations built for major ticketing systems to help automate reconciliation of our logs back to the originating change requests where the changes began. We give you several tools for working with this data and producing audit-ready reports that will greatly reduce both your costs and your stress levels. Platform Encryption is designed to let you retain critical app functionality—like search, workflow, and validation rules—so you maintain full control over encryption keys. You can set encrypted data permissions to protect sensitive data from unauthorized adjusting entries users. Platform encryption allows you to natively encrypt your most sensitive data at rest across all of your Salesforce apps.

Salesforce Visibility Explained: How Record Access Really Works

Salesforce Shield pricing is structured as a percentage of your total Salesforce spend, offering a flexible pricing model that scales with your Salesforce investment. The pricing includes several components, each designed to enhance your Salesforce environment’s security and compliance capabilities. Professional Services and Salesforce Certified Partners provide services to get you started with data and ensure long-term success with AI.

  • Salesforce Field Audit Trail transforms governance from reactive damage control to proactive oversight.
  • Regardless of these being two separate records, the Cipher text for “San Diego” will be the same.
  • This also proves that the audit trail can aid in troubleshooting certain situations.
  • Auditing features do not provide security to the organization themselves but they provide information about usage of the system which will be helpful in diagnosing potential or real security issues.
  • Salesforce provides different types of application to monitor changes in our salesforce organisation, user activities and object history tracking.
  • Both of these functions track what data changes, in which fields, when, and by which user.
  • The scan results will show you where you have sensitive data within your org that needs reviewing to ensure you’re protecting it.
  • Use Data Detect to expedite data categorization by aligning sensitivity levels and categories to actual field data.
  • Salesforce Shield is an advanced security suite designed to provide enhanced protection, monitoring, and data retention for organizations using Salesforce.
  • For those seeking a comprehensive security solution, the complete Salesforce Shield bundle is available for 30% of your total Salesforce spend.
  • You can use it for regulatory compliance, internal governance, audits, or customer service.

Storing up to 10 years of field changes across 60 fields per object can use a lot of space, so make sure to plan your storage strategy ahead of time. Monitoring changes in Salesforce is crucial not just for maintaining data integrity, but also for ensuring compliance and understanding user behavior. By knowing the advantages of using either Field History Tracking or Audit Trail, you can gain comprehensive visibility into changes at both the record and admin levels. Explore our solutions to ensure comprehensive security for critical data in your Salesforce org. We originally created Secure History Retention Policy Manager feature because FAT didn’t have a user interface. We provided you the ability to easily configure your retention policies with clicks, not code all within the cockpit.

Data Management

This tool is essential for identifying and mitigating potential security threats, ensuring compliance, and optimizing the performance of your Salesforce environment. By tracking user actions and monitoring various events, organizations can proactively address issues before they escalate. We designed Netwrix Strongpoint to close the gaps left by Field History Tracking and the Setup Audit Trail. Our products offer a comprehensive set of compliance tools that track and report changes to user access, metadata and revenue-related configuration data in a detailed, immutable log.

Then, choose the Success Plan that’s right for your business.

field audit trail salesforce

Out-of-the-box, Salesforce can get you much of the information you need to pass a SOX audit. Before you start, it’s important to understand what you can — and can’t — do in your Org already. If you want to mask (obfuscate) data from Salesforce users viewing data within the Salesforce interface, you will need to look for another option.

field audit trail salesforce

Many customers will choose to bring that into Splunk or Qradar to align Salesforce event monitoring with other event monitoring from across their tech stack. Field tracking policies (i.e. what, stored for how long, deleted after how long) are set up Foreign Currency Translation using the metadata API, which Salesforce provides out of the box. Salesforce Shield Platform Encryption has been extended to Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud). Summer ‘25 introduced Platform Encryption for Data Cloud by allowing support for External Key Management (EKM), giving Data 360 customers far greater control over their encryption keys.

field audit trail salesforce

Salesforce itself recommends that you leverage a tool called Streaming Monitor from the AppExchange to view your event logs. Luckily, once you’re comfortable working with metadata directly in its XML format, there are just four values that you need to set per object that you wish to track via Shield Field Audit Trail. Now that you’ve got a secret set up, you can begin encrypting your data and files. In Setup, head over to the Encryption Settings page, and scroll down to the Advanced Encryption Settings section. You can click the Select Fields button to mark the fields you’d audit trail like to be encrypted. In the table on the Key Inventory and Management page (Key Management in Setup), you’ll see an Export button next to each line.

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