Finding the Exact Change (A206)

Finding the exact change that might have caused an issue

Tracking down the cause of an issue could be tough. But with the ability to investigate all changes over time, Elements will help you to troubleshoot your issue as quickly as possible.

There are times when it is not immediately apparent when the issue first occurred. Loss of access/ visibility of certain records could have affected a use-case which is not common enough to trigger immediate alarm from the users. An automation might have been executing without any errors or might have failed to start in the first place. 

In all of those cases, especially if there have been subsequent changes to the same metadata, it might be tricky to figure out what change to the metadata caused the issue (and who caused it!)

The changelog comparison comes with the ability to jump through time to investigate all changes over time, as well as the ability to jump straight to the next difference. That way you can troubleshoot your issue as quickly as possible. 

Illustrative example

To show the changelog comparison in action, let us use a worked example, when there have been many changes to a permission set.

Recently you discovered data corruption on an Opportunity object. Some users were manually inputting Chance of renewal for an Opportunity which should be calculated automatically and displayed in a read-only field. 
Using the change log report, you have identified that the only thing that changed recently that could have an impact is the ‘Manage cases’ permission set.

You check the change log comparison to see the following changes:

1: Ksawery removed all permissions to see the Account object. This does not explain why users were able to edit  Chance of renewal for an Opportunity.

2: By navigating back in time you see that Ksawery added view access to a lot of fields on the Account object. This does not explain why users were able to edit  Chance of renewal for an Opportunity.  Observe how you can use the blue chevrons in the top corners to navigate through timestamped records for this changelog.

3: You finally find the change, dated April 20th. On that date, Ksawery turned on edit rights on the Opportunity object for this permission set, and made the Chance of renewal field explicitly editable by users in this permission set. You can now discuss with Ksawery why he made that change, and you can audit the Opportunity records updated after 20th of April.

You can see that we were able to navigate all the way back to the Initial metadata definition, that is the state of metadata that was synced when the Org was first connected to Elements.

What’s next

Next, you will take a short, theory and practical quiz. Select it from the menu below.

This quiz will help you to recognise the skills and knowledge you have gained, and identify any areas you still need to explore and learn.

Remember, you can revisit these pages, or ask us for help if you get stuck. Once you pass the quiz, click “Next Module” to move on to Module 3.