
In this post, we’ll go through what Setup Audit Trail entails, what changes can be tracked, and why it is an out-of-the-box functionality you should definitely make use of. When multiple updates occur on the same record—especially through integrations—you may see UNABLE_TO_LOCK_ROW errors. Implement pagination and respect rate limits when building custom audit reports or data exports. Implementing Salesforce Field Audit Trail requires both administrative setup and API-based configuration to support consistent policies across environments. Customer financial records, contract modifications, and permission changes belong in your high-priority tier.

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This feature helps you comply with industry regulations related to audit capability and data retention. As more customers use Salesforce to store personally identifiable information, including sensitive, confidential, or proprietary data, it’s critical to ensure the privacy and confidentiality of that data. The tools included in Shield allow you to meet both external and internal data compliance policies.
Event Monitoring Analytics
Prioritize fields containing sensitive data, financial information, or those subject to regulatory oversight. It supports the shared responsibility model of cloud security, where Salesforce ensures the security of the infrastructure, and the customer is responsible for securing their data and configurations. Salesforce Shield also delivers capabilities that are not provided with Salesforce out of the box (we’ll cover these later). These are especially key for customers who have sensitive data in Salesforce and/or operate in regulated industries. Data privacy and security laws mean you must ensure that certain PII or sensitive data is not exposed. Field Audit Trail lets you define a policy to retain archived field history data indefinitely from when the data was archived.
Track Up to 60 Fields Per Object
- Field Audit Trail is one of the three components of Salesforce Shield (Salesforce’s premium security products).
- While Field Audit Trail captures every critical change within Salesforce, Flosum’s Composite Backup technology and built-in encryption ensure that your data and metadata are securely backed up and easily restored.
- Use a convenient UI to update data classifications as you discover and review fields containing sensitive data.
- You can use the Salesforce Metadata API to define a retention policy for your field history.
- This feature helps you comply with industry regulations related to audit capability and data retention.
Adopting powerful tools and continuously improving security practices ensures resilience against potential breaches, positioning companies to explore the complexities of data protection with confidence and integrity. Salesforce Shield Field Audit Trail works by recording detailed information about changes to specified fields within Salesforce objects. This information includes what changes were made, who made them, and when they were made.
Fuel AI and Forecasting: Is Your Salesforce Data Prepared?
Reco’s platform offers advanced monitoring and response capabilities, ensuring that any suspicious activities are quickly identified and mitigated. You can view this information over time, by field or by user who made the changes. Once you’ve selected audit trail certain fields to track, a record of any changes will be added to the History related list, capturing the date and time of the change, who made it, and other important details.
Agentforce 360 Platform
Since Field History Tracking logs the user responsible for each change, it’s basically a transparent audit trail that can be used to address any discrepancies or unauthorized alterations. Field History Tracking is a feature that allows you to track changes to individual fields on an object. For example, you’d like to know a specific lead’s previous owner and what status updates were made by its current owner. This tool is especially useful when you need to monitor how specific data points evolve over time. To further enhance the security and monitoring capabilities of Salesforce Shield, integrating with Reco’s SaaS Detection & Response solutions can provide comprehensive visibility and automated threat detection.

Enabling Field History Retention
Event Monitoring gives you access to detailed performance, security, and usage data on your Salesforce apps. On top of this, reviewing the Setup Audit Trail for a sandbox will have to be done in that particular sandbox; the production org’s audit trail can tell you when a sandbox was deleted. Even though the main focus is certainly around metadata updates or deletions happening within Cash Flow Statement the org, some data changes are also tracked and visible within the Setup Audit Trail. Reporting snapshots, mass transfers and even using the Data Import Wizard are a few of the ones being captured.

Extend the Power of Salesforce Field Audit Trail with Flosum

With recording transactions 10-year retention and 60-field tracking, it becomes the foundation for forensic investigations and operational insights. If some changes aren’t being recorded, the issue often lies in your metadata setup. The Tooling API provides the most efficient access to FieldHistoryArchive records, but standard rate limits apply.