Flow Error Monitoring

Flow Error Monitoring

When to use this skill

Activate when:

• An org has > 50 active flows and fault emails are flooding one inbox.
• You need org-wide visibility into flow-failure trends.
• A specific flow is failing intermittently and you want to establish a baseline before tuning.
• You're setting up ops rotations and need a paging policy for flow failures.
• You're integrating Salesforce with an external observability platform (Splunk, Datadog).

Do NOT use this skill for:

• Diagnosing a specific flow error in isolation (use skills/flow/flow-runtime-error-diagnosis).
• Enabling debug mode for step-by-step tracing (use skills/flow/flow-debugging).
• Post-mortem root-cause analysis for a critical flow failure (diagnosis + skills/devops/incident-response).

Core concept — three error surfaces

Salesforce exposes flow errors through three independent surfaces. A mature monitoring setup uses all three.

Fault emails are the default; they're necessary but not sufficient. A monitoring-first org uses all three surfaces, routed by severity.

Recommended Workflow

1. Inventory the flow portfolio. Use Flow Trigger Explorer + tooling_query('SELECT DeveloperName, Status FROM Flow WHERE Status IN ('Active')') to enumerate active flows.
2. Decide default fault-email recipient policy. Most orgs default to the flow creator; route them instead to a shared ops alias or by domain (sales-ops, service-ops).
3. Classify flows by severity. P0 (revenue-impacting), P1 (operational), P2 (convenience). Different surfaces + thresholds per severity.
4. Design the central log object. Fields: severity, source, message, record Id context, timestamp, correlation Id.
5. Wire every flow's fault connectors to write to the log AND (for P0) send a targeted alert. Existing flows: audit via a script that checks for missing fault paths.
6. Build the runtime error report + dashboard. Group by flow, by day, by error type. Publish to the ops Slack channel or email.
7. Set alerting thresholds. P0: 1 failure = immediate page. P1: 5/hour = email. P2: daily digest.
8. Schedule a quarterly review of error trends. Declining P1 rates = flow portfolio getting healthier; growing = something's rotting.

Key patterns

Pattern 1 — Central log object design

Integration_Log__c
  - Source__c           (Text) — e.g. "Opportunity_StageChange_Flow"
  - Severity__c         (Picklist: CRITICAL, ERROR, WARNING, INFO)
  - Message__c          (Text Long)
  - Record_Id__c        (Text 18) — the record that triggered the failure
  - User_Id__c          (Lookup User)
  - Correlation_Id__c   (Text 64) — for grouping related failures
  - Flow_Name__c        (Text)
  - Flow_Version__c     (Number)
  - Stack_Trace__c      (Text Long)
  - Created_Date        (standard)

Index: Severity + Created_Date for the monitoring dashboard query.

Pattern 2 — Fault path template for every flow

Every flow should terminate every fault connector with the same skeleton:

[Critical element — e.g. Create Records]
        │
        fault path
        ▼
[Assignment — build log payload]
        │
        ▼
[Create Records — Integration_Log__c]
        │
        ▼
[Decision — severity = CRITICAL?]
        │
        ├── Yes  → [Send Email Alert] → [End]
        └── No   → [End]

Use templates/flow/FaultPath_Template.md as the baseline.

Pattern 3 — Runtime error report

Report type: Flow Interviews with Status = "Error"

• Filter: Last 7 days
• Group by: Flow Name
• Summarize: Count of errors, Last error time
• Subscribe: daily email to ops alias

Add a dashboard component showing weekly trend.

Pattern 4 — External observability bridge

For orgs with Splunk / Datadog:

Integration_Log__c (Create after Insert trigger)
     │
     ▼
[Apex trigger / flow → Platform Event: Integration_Error__e]
     │
     ▼
[Pub/Sub API subscriber in Splunk / Datadog]
     │
     ▼
Dashboards + alerting in external platform

Don't pull from Salesforce on a schedule (rate-limited, laggy); push via Platform Event instead.

Pattern 5 — Alerting thresholds

Bulk safety

• The fault-path log write should be a Create Records (single record per failure), never a Create Records inside a Loop over the failing records — that would compound the failure.
• Bulk-processed flows (record-triggered, scheduled) may log multiple records per transaction; ensure the log object is write-scalable (no required references to other objects that might be missing).

Error handling

• The fault-path log write can itself fault. Don't infinite-loop: set a max-recursion boundary, or use a second-tier fault path that routes to a raw email.
• If Integration_Log__c fills up, archive to BigObject or dump to external observability — don't delete.

Well-Architected mapping

• Reliability — without monitoring, flow failures accumulate as unnoticed data corruption. Monitoring makes failure visible, which is the precondition for fixing it.
• Operational Excellence — ops teams can't run flow portfolios by reading individual fault emails. Centralized logging + trend dashboards are the force multiplier.

Gotchas

See references/gotchas.md.

Testing

Test each flow's fault path by forcing a known failure in a test class:

@IsTest
static void testFaultPathLogsCorrectly() {
    // Force a DML failure.
    insertConflictingRecordBeforeFlow();

    Test.startTest();
    // Invoke flow; expect it to take the fault path.
    ...
    Test.stopTest();

    Integration_Log__c log = [SELECT Severity__c, Source__c FROM Integration_Log__c LIMIT 1];
    System.assertEquals('ERROR', log.Severity__c);
    System.assertEquals('Opportunity_StageChange_Flow', log.Source__c);
}

Official Sources Used

• Salesforce Help — Troubleshoot Flows with Flow Runtime Error Reports: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.flow_troubleshoot_runtime.htm
• Salesforce Help — Set Flow Apex Exception Email Recipients: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.flow_admin_exception_email.htm
• Salesforce Developer — FlowInterviewLog sObject: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.object_reference.meta/object_reference/sforce_api_objects_flowinterviewlog.htm
• Salesforce Architects — Observability Patterns: https://architect.salesforce.com/