Why monitor and act on Salesforce Org metadata changes?
Monitoring changes being done to your Org helps platform owners ensure that the Org is evolving in a structured, efficient manner in accordance with established best practices.
It helps you to understand:
Whether the team delivers a lot of changes at a quick pace or not (velocity)
Where is the effort being directed (permissions, code, declarative automations)
Whether technical debt is being addressed
Whether things are built properly the first time or do they require a lot of re-works going forward
Understanding those aspects helps you take proactive approach to improving your development lifecycle.
When to use metadata change insights?
Monitoring your Org should be a regular activity, not just something done during deployments. We recommend reviewing metadata insights weekly or monthly to track the ongoing evolution of your Org. This helps you monitor the velocity of changes and ensures that any issues related to technical debt, unplanned work, or over-complexity are addressed proactively.
Prerequisites
In order to follow this guide you need:
Salesforce Metadata Management license
Synced Salesforce Org into Metadata Dictionary Production or Full Sandbox)
Monitor Org Development
Step 1: Review the velocity and pattern of changes
First, open the Governance dashboard in your Analytics 360. You will have to select the time range (from / to) for which you would like to visualize changes in your Org.
Maximum time period for which you can analyze changes is 6 months. Changes are being tracked from the first sync of your Org to Elements.
You can start your analysis from the Changed metadata by week chart. Overall, it highlights the pace and volume of modifications within your Org (excluding any managed package changes). Knowing your Org, and your team, you can use that to evaluate whether the pattern of activity is in-line with expectations and targets.
Interpreting patterns of change activity
Interpreting patterns of change activity
The chart showing volume of changed metadata week by week can look differently across Orgs. Here is how to interpret the bar chart:
Consistent, Low Activity: Indicates regular maintenance, minor updates, or a stable period with small, controlled changes. The org is likely in a steady operational state with minimal disruption.
Consistent, High Activity: Suggests an active development phase or continuous release cycles, possibly due to large projects or frequent iterations. This can signal rapid innovation but may also increase the risk of system instability.
Occasional Spikes: Large, irregular increases in changes point to significant deployments, like major feature rollouts or system upgrades. These periods could require focused testing and change management.
Irregular, Fluctuating Activity: Reflects inconsistent development patterns, potentially indicating ad-hoc or reactive changes in response to issues, urgent requests, or lack of structured planning.
Extended Periods of No Activity: Suggests a freeze on changes, likely during a stabilization or maintenance period, where the focus may be on system performance or user adoption rather than new development.
Below is a chart for an Org with two admins using Elements application. On average, across 6 months, there were 347 changes per week. While there are a couple of spikes, indicating some sort of release / end of project, the Org shows sustained high level of activity. In this case, this is due to a lot of innovation and iteration.
Step 2: Review the Types of Changes by Week Chart
Knowing how many metadata components get changed week by week over time is a very limited picture. We also need to understand what types of changes are being done to an Org.
There are three types of changes that Elements is logging automatically for your Org:
New / Creations: We detect any metadata that gets created anew in your Org.
Updates: We detect any metadata modifications, i.e. changes to already existing metadata.
Deletions: We detect when a metadata component is no longer present in the Org, indicating its deletion from the Org.
The types of changes chart shows the same volumes of changes as the previous velocity chart, but this time it overlays that with information about the share of changes that were creations, updates, or deletions.
Use this chart to monitor the balance between additions, updates, and deletions. A healthy Org will show a balance across these categories, with regular deletions indicating efforts to clean up unused or outdated components.
Low or no deletions could be a red flag. It suggests the Org may not be dealing with technical debt effectively, allowing unused or outdated functionality to accumulate. Over time, this can lead to increased complexity and performance issues.
Set a policy to dedicate 10%-15% of monthly development capacity to reviewing and cleaning up technical debt. This can include deleting unused components and refactoring existing functionality for better performance.
Step 3: Analyze the Types of Metadata Being Worked On
The last chart breaks down the number of changes week by week by the type of metadata being changed.
Review which metadata components are seeing the most changes. Frequent changes to profiles and permission sets are often expected (Salesforce's own report found out that admins spend up to 20% of their time troubleshooting permissions!) However, frequent changes to validation rules, flows, or apex (week after week) may indicate issues and frequent bug fixing, pointing to automations that weren't built properly in the first place.
Tip: If the chart shows a high volume of changes to Flows, Apex Classes, and Validation Rules, investigate further. Frequent changes in these areas may indicate that automations or rules were not built correctly in the first place, requiring ongoing fixes.
Step 4: Run deeper analysis
At this point you should have a sense of your team's velocity, type of changes being done in your Org, and type of metadata being worked on. You might want to run deeper analysis and identify components that see recurring changes, or users who perform specific types of changes.
From any of the three mentioned charts, click the 'Download CSV' button. This will download the entire raw dataset of change log records which you can take into a spreadsheet and run further, detailed analysis on.
Step 5: Monitor Net % Change in Metadata
To get a sense for how your Org has evolved over a specified timeframe, investigate the Net % change chart. For any metadata type, it shows % score of by how much the count of metadata has increased or decreased in your Org.
