As a Marketo admin, your job is to make sure your instance is running in tip-top shape, and it’s important to establish routines to keep your instance healthy. You’ll be done with your Marketo Morning before you’ve drained your coffee cup, and you’ll start your day with a quick pulse on the health of your instance and be able to identify any issues before they get out of control.
1. Notifications
The notifications tab is on the very left of your top navigation bar, and it is the place you’ll most frequently find issues. Notification types include CRM sync failures, API errors, quarterly idle trigger cleanups, and ad platform sync failures.
You’ll want to click into any records that had CRM sync failures, click “Activity Log” and see if there was a successful “Sync Person Update” action. If not, correct any field validation errors, and re-sync the records with a “Sync to CRM” action. If a large number of Person records all had the same error, select all and sync all of them. Make sure to click on the “View Results” link to confirm that they all synced successfully.
Web services errors happen occasionally, and usually resolve themselves. But if you start seeing a pattern of the same errors in high numbers, you can contact Marketo Support and they will tell you which sync user is causing the error.
Champion Tip: I keep a log of all notifications in a spreadsheet, and when I see a pattern of sync issues, I work with my CRM admin to research and fix the root of the issues.
2. Campaign Queue
The campaign queue is a bit hidden, but it’s a great way to check on the health of your instance. It gives you a quick snapshot of how the plumbing is running in your instance. To find it, click at the top of your Marketing Activities navigation bar (if you have multiple Workspaces, there is a separate queue for each).
Here you’ll see all Smart Campaigns that are running or waiting to run. It’s key to remember that your Marketo has a finite amount of processing power, so if you have too many smart campaigns all trying to run at once, they’re going to get clogged in the queue.
Having a full queue is not necessarily an indicator of anything going wrong—if you have just sent out a big email blast, or there is a lot of activity on your website, there will naturally be a lot of activity in Marketo. However, it’s a good idea to scrutinize the active campaigns and see if any one campaign is processing a high volume of person records and preventing other smart campaigns from running.
If you want to learn more, Marketing Rockstar Guides has a detailed explainer on load balancing your campaign queue.
Champion Tip: If your campaign queue looks full, take a screenshot, and check it an hour later and compare.
3. Salesforce Sync
Next, I head over to the Admin section to do a quick check of three key areas of integration. First, I check on my SFDC sync. In the “Integrations” section of Admin, click on the icon for SFDC. On the top right, you’ll see a datetime stamp of when Marketo last synced with SFDC. As a reminder, SFDC sync will update any records that have changed in either platform, and the next sync will start 5 minutes after the last one has completed. If you have a lot of records updating in one platform or the other, your sync may take longer than usual. Spot checking this once a day will help give you an idea of if you have any sync issues that you should investigate.
SFDC sync errors are now detailed in the Sync Errors tab. Review and troubleshoot any sync errors from here.
Champion Tip: If you double-click on an item in the error log, it will pull up a detail view that includes the SFDC ID and the Marketo ID. You can search the Marketo ID in the Database by typing in "[id]" followed by the ID number.
4. Launchpoint
Launchpoint is the home for all your non-CRM integrations, whether they’re native Marketo integrations or custom API connections. Give this a quick once-over. Are there any disconnected services that are showing errors? Or is one of your services set to expire and needs to be re-authenticated?
5. Web Services
Finally, click into Web Services to keep an eye on how many API calls are being made between Marketo and all those API connections you reviewed in steps 3 and 4. You want to ensure that you’re staying well below your daily limit—if you hit your limit, Marketo won’t be able to communicate with any other systems for the rest of the day!
First, you’ll see your Daily Request Limit and Requests in the Last 7 Days. Requests in the last 7 days is a nice quick snapshot of a rolling 7 day period.
If you click in to that number of requests, you’ll see a table of the number of calls made by each service over the past week. If anything looks higher or lower than expected, you know where to investigate further.
Do you have a Marketo Morning routine? Is there anything else that you like to check regularly? Comment below!
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