We all know that Salesforce is a powerful and highly modifiable platform. What’s less appreciated is its Achilles heel: troubleshooting. Out of the box, Salesforce does not provide strong error-handling and logging tools. Resolving an error can be time consuming and unnecessarily complicated. And in complex environments, errors can create havoc, possibly hurting business revenue and damaging a company’s reputation.
To work around this gap, many support teams have turned to open-source logging tools like Nebula Logger and RFLIB. Recently a new option became available—also free—that takes troubleshooting in the Salesforce ecosystem a step further and for the first time provides a path to true Salesforce observability.
Called Pharos Triton, it’s a complete logging solution that runs natively on Salesforce. Like Nebula Logger, it gives users advanced tools to capture, manage, and analyze errors effectively.
What differentiates Pharos Triton is that it’s more than just a free utility. Built by the team at Pharos AI, it also plugs into a mature observability platform, so teams can transition from basic logging to advanced error monitoring and analysis.
Why Logging and Observability Matter with Salesforce
In recent years, Salesforce has become increasingly complex and customized. With the platform now running business critical processes, support teams are looking for more advanced tools to manage their environments. That’s because even a minor error in Apex code, a failed flow, or a governor limit breach can mean painful disruptions.
With more than 20,000 installs since 2018, Nebula Logger quickly established itself as the go-to solution for logging Salesforce errors.
With its push into observability, Pharos Triton expands on Nebula’s core capabilities. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, observability is a time-tested engineering process that allows one to understand the internal state of a system based on its external outputs.
When applied to Salesforce, this means users gain the ability to monitor, log, and trace errors across a variety of operations, including Apex, Flows, and Bulk APIs. This can be done in real-time and with a deeper level of analysis. This strategic approach keeps big trouble at bay, and when errors do occur, it allows teams to resolve issues much more rapidly.
To date, however, no native observability solution has existed for Salesforce except Pharos. (Solutions like Splunk and DataDog are not native to the Salesforce platform and thus run externally. This means your data must be exported outside of Salesforce, your capabilities are limited, and results may not be available in real-time.)
By connecting logging to observability, Pharos Triton serves as a bridge to these advanced functions for teams wanting to move in that direction.
The Pharos Triton Issue Details screen can provide granular details about where issues are occurring, greatly simplifying and accelerating troubleshooting.
The Evolution from Logging to Observability
Nebula Logger, a game-changer when it arrived on the scene, offers a flexible logging system that allows users to capture and view Salesforce errors across multiple transactions.
However, as Salesforce ecosystems have become larger and more complex, many support teams are looking to move beyond logging for deeper insights. This is where Pharos Triton shines.
- Observability: While Nebula Logger focuses on logging, Pharos Triton takes the next step toward observability. It not only logs errors but also offers a complete view of the system’s health. Pharos Triton helps users automatically catch errors that typically fall through the cracks—such as flow errors, governor limit breaches, other unhandled apex failures, and bulk API errors—in real time, without any code modifications.
- Real-time Notifications: Pharos Triton provides real-time notifications through platforms like Slack, MS Teams, and email, ensuring that the right teams are immediately alerted to issues, significantly reducing the time to resolution. This system is highly configurable, allowing teams to fine-tune which logs or issues trigger alerts, ensuring that they aren’t flooded with unnecessary notifications.
- Error Fingerprinting and Issue Tracking: Pharos Triton introduces error fingerprinting, which automatically groups related errors into larger, more manageable issues. This reduces noise and helps teams focus on resolving systemic problems rather than individual error logs. In addition, Pharos Triton offers a built-in issue tracker that allows teams to manage, triage and action issues directly within Salesforce.
- Retention and Archival: Another area where Pharos Triton stands out is its flexible log retention and archival options. Users can create rules that determine which logs should be retained and for how long, providing more control over storage usage—a crucial consideration for Salesforce environments where storage costs can quickly escalate. Pharos Triton even supports archiving logs to Salesforce Big Objects, a scalable storage solution, to preserve important logs without impacting primary storage limits.
- Security: Running natively within Salesforce, Pharos Triton ensures that sensitive data never leaves the Salesforce environment. This native integration means that Pharos Triton is part of Salesforce’s enterprise-grade security protocols, an important consideration for industries where data privacy and compliance are critical.
- Ease of Use: While Nebula Logger offers a wealth of logging capabilities, it definitely requires a seasoned developer to manage and maintain it. Pharos Triton, on the other hand, is designed to be easy to use, with minimal configuration required. The managed package can be installed in a few minutes, and users can start capturing errors immediately, without modifying any existing Apex code or Flows. The Pharos platform was built from the ground up to provide a smooth, intuitive user experience, making it accessible even to teams with limited technical expertise.
- Code modification: As with Nebula Logger, you can modify the code of Pharos Triton to suit your own purposes. This opens up all sorts of opportunities for developers seeking to tackle a particular situation.
Pharos also offers paths for growth that aren’t available with open-source solutions. The Pharos Triton and the basic tier of Pharos observability are free forever. If you have an especially complex situation, paid tiers provide advanced capabilities, such as granular analytics, Jira and Azure DevOps integrations, tracing, and customizable multi-org monitoring for larger environments.
Screenshot of a Pharos Triton custom log.
Summary
While easy and intuitive to use, Pharos Triton has a lot of sophisticated capabilities that go beyond capturing logs. It also connects to powerful observability features within the larger Pharos platform, including real-time notifications, error fingerprinting, and issue tracking.
If you’re looking to enhance your team’s error-handling capabilities and gain deeper insights into your systems, Pharos Triton provides a path towards more efficient troubleshooting and a more resilient Salesforce environment.
To learn more about Pharos Triton and to download the free package, visit pharos.ai/triton.
