When users complain that Salesforce is slow, you’re (again) facing the most common Salesforce performance issue. While it’s better than having Salesforce down, users will quickly object to an unresponsive, slow Salesforce experience. After wasting time restarting their browser and rebooting their machine in a nearly helpless attempt to resolve slow Salesforce performance, most will settle in for an unproductive day waiting for Salesforce to perform basic tasks, generate reports, and reload pages. A small fraction of users will create a helpdesk ticket, putting IT in the difficult, yet increasingly familiar position of trying to figure out what is impacting Salesforce performance, who is affected, where they are located, and what steps they should take to resolve the issue.
What Does Salesforce Say?
It’s interesting that slow Salesforce performance is so common that even Salesforce has resources to help you troubleshoot these issues. Here’s a link to the set of guidelines they provide. This set of basic instructions will assist you in determining whether the problem is with your infrastructure, a third-party ISP, or Salesforce itself.
Salesforce.com Support Teams require data to help you troubleshoot the problem and will ask you to provide traceroute and ping data along with answers to the basic questions needed to develop an accurate problem definition. By following Salesforce’s instructions, you will have to:
- Check status.salesforce.com to be aware of any known incident or maintenance operation that could impact the way your users access Salesforce.com
- Collect basic information to feed the problem definition (you will need to conduct your own tests and ask your colleagues what they are experiencing):
- When was the first time you noticed a problem connecting to your Salesforce instance?
- How often is the problem occurring? Consistently? Randomly?
- Can you easily reproduce the problem if asked to do so by Salesforce support?
- Check other programs you are running on your computer, and apps in your browser, to see if they are also performing slowly.
- Check for local IT changes or issues.
- Conduct basic network-specific troubleshooting:
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- Use ping and traceroute.
- perform a network packet capture (PCAP) from your organization’s network
If you are an average enterprise end user, you probably gave up pretty quickly. If you are a seasoned IT professional, you will certainly read through these instructions with a good dose of scepticism as the limitations of this approach are obvious:
- How does this approach help me catch intermittent issues?
- Why are the following not addressed: VPNs, CASB/SASE security, DNS and redirection issues, browser configuration, and memory usage?
- How does this identify if Salesforce plugins or integrations with other software are the issue?
- How do I know how many people are affected and where they are? Is this affecting work from home employees, those in the office, or both?
- What if my tests do reflect the issues faced by my customers? What should I do?
Going through this very manual process for enterprise-class IT, simply does not scale. As a business critical service, this approach to troubleshooting does not provide the speed and insight required to quickly resolve salesforce performance issues, especially intermittent performance degradations.
What You Need to Fix Salesforce Performance Issues
What are the best practices to avoid Salesforce performance degradations and reduce resolution times? Implementing proactive monitoring and analytics is essential for ensuring that performance issues are identified and addressed quickly.
Here is the kind of digital experience monitoring and network performance monitoring visibility you will require:
- visibility into all (or a subset of) your Salesforce users.
- early alerts for Salesforce performance degradations (do not wait for users to complain; they may be suffering in silence).
- analytics that clearly define the scope of the degradation:
- a certain site or country?
- users who work from home? from a specific region? ISP?
- is Salesforce generally slow, or are only specific functions affected?
- insight into third party and integrated applications: Force.com code execution, specific Salesforce modules, API calls made to other apps, and the ability to identify which hostnames are involved.
You will also need to be able to monitor the digital experience of employees using Salesforce, as well as the underlying end-to-end infrastructure it depends on: network (including ISPs, SD WANs, VPNs, and cloud networks), application, security gateway, device, and browser performance. This will help you pinpoint the infrastructure layer responsible for the degradation:
- the endpoint itself: a specific browser or OS.
- the local / private network, whether an enterprise LAN or home Wi-Fi
- a specific ISP or service provider
- CASB / SASE / ZTNA gateways
- an issue along the Internet path between users and Salesforce.com or other third-party applications connected to it
- Poor geo-based redirection by Salesforce or your DNS provider
- Salesforce server response issues
- Another integrated app’s performance
With this level of knowledge, IT and helpdesk teams can decide right away where to begin, what course of action to take, and, if a third party is involved, have clear evidence to have an effective conversation in the direction of quickly solving the “Salesforce slow” issue.
Start Monitoring Your Salesforce Users’ Digital Experience Today
To ensure that Salesforce users get the best experience possible, it is important to monitor their performance and track any changes in usage patterns. The Kadiska digital experience platform was developed specifically for the purpose of monitoring the performance of SaaS applications like Salesforce.
Kadiska can identify connectivity, security, browser, and Salesforce hosting issues that are affecting onsite and remote employees in all business regions. Response times and errors are measured for every transaction, host, and user. Take advantage of uninterrupted visibility to dynamically detect and diagnose issues, find solutions to problems, and optimise the performance of Salesforce, as well as the digital experience and productivity of your employees.
You can start by monitoring up to 50 of your Salesforce users for free. It takes less than 5 minutes to set up.
