Notification for Sync Failures

Notification for Sync Failures

There really should be a way to notify someone if a record sync failed, especially considering Marketo gives up after the first try.

An example of where this is extremely prevalent is for SFDC integration customers who have validation rules setup. Validation rules related to Leads/Contacts are fairly common is SFDC, but they are often setup over time by an admin as they are needed, especially when new custom fields are created. A by-product of this process is that existing database records that were in SFDC don't have values in the required fields, so from the moment a validation rule is setup and going forward, when the record is being edited by a user it won't save unless that required field has a value. Since Marketo needs a SF user login, it is subject to these validation rules.

The example above may want to be documented in the SFDC installation/integration guides as well, since validation rules are not necessarily part of permissions and can apply to an admin user. We had no way of knowing, and luckily we caught this before we launched our first nurture campaign... otherwise thousands of records wouldn't have synced anything. *gulp*

I should add that a sync failed notification would be useful in more cases than the specific example above... API limits for example. I'm sure there are other examples that cause a sync failure.

64 Comments
Anonymous
Not applicable
Still looking for a single listing of all SFDC sync errors, or an error trigger to send a notification to one of our admins.
Michael_Langell
Level 4
Agree this is a huge problem.  Any type of alert or smart list or anything that could isolate when a lead fails to sync or get added to a SFDC campaign would be very beneficial.  

Anonymous
Not applicable
These notifications don't appear to include all of the sync failures.  For example recently we had dozens of leads fail to sync due a SFDC validation rule (error message started with “Failed: FIELD_CUSTOM_VALIDATION_EXCEPTION: ..."). and there was no notification for this. 

It looks like there is only one failed sync notification that is sent around 1:00 am on the day after the sync errors occur.  If there are other leads with sync errors due to the same cause, it looks like at least some of those email addresses are displayed, but it appears that if there are sync errors due to differents causes, only one of the sych errors (and the affected leads) is listed.

Also, in the case where the "Why" section of the notification was "Marketo is unable to add leads to one or more Salesforce campaigns.", no Sample Leads were displayed.

Marketo really needs to provide a filter that will list all lead records with all different sync errors, so we can more easily identify all affected leads, resolve the cause and force a sync of all the affected leads.
Anonymous
Not applicable
This is still an issue. I receive notifications each month due to a Salesforce Sync Error. It's sometimes due to an Contact becoming inactive (we don't sync inactive contacts) but sometimes there's no reason. Can you give more detail in this section so I don't have to call up support each time this occurs to see the Marketo ID for the leads/contacts affected or at the very least the smart campagin this is coming from? I've had multiple campaigns that I thought were syncing fine but found out a month later there were never allocated to the appropriate SFDC camaign. 
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Anonymous
Not applicable
Was just about to post an idea on this too --- Marketo - any update?

-- We can now subscribe for an alert when the overall sync fails between salesforce and marketo which is GREAT. However, I'm still uncovering individual leads which have failed to update/sync from time to time. These failures are only located by manual mining through lead history detail. I need a way to view these failures in aggregate so I can troubleshoot and ensure that the sync fail hasn't resulted in data loss between systems (sometimes the sync fails several times in a row. 

Does anyone else have this issue? I'm DESPERATE for a view into these lead failures 🙂 ---
Anonymous
Not applicable
Amber, I'm pretty sure we all have this issue.  In the Failed Marketo Activity Notice/Alert discussion, I describe a method whereby you can receive an email alert whenever a sync  failure occurs.  It's not terribly elegant, but I receive an email alert for every sync failure within a couple of minutes of its occurrance.  I even knew that Marketo was having an issue with logging into SFDC yesterday long before they sent out the Customer Support Alert email.  I also have a daily report that lists all the leads for which a sync failure alert was sent in the last day.  Alternately, you could create a list with the leads that had sync failures and clear the list out periodically.

A warning that if you are running something that causes a lot of syncs, they will get queued up and leads will be identified by the 'Not Lead was Synced to SFDC filter in past 5 minutes' filter that haven't yet had a chance to sync, so you should either disable the smart campaign that sends the alert emails or lengthen the time interval to an hour or longer.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Its pretty upsetting to see that this was requested on 8/12/2011 and has had over 250 likes and there is still no progress on this measure. This is a critical issue, how can it be that there is no way to identify sync failures?
Anonymous
Not applicable
Marketo's only workaround is to create a campaign that catches updates to records that will fail a validation rule, and send an email alert. We have done this, and it is hugely inefficient. 

We even tried to use the Marketo API to come up with our own solution -- at least to log the errors. However, errors in lead activity aren't even available in the API, so we couldn't do anything. 

This is a huge problem with Marketo to Salesforce integration. Marketo: can ypu please focus more on fixing your core. 
Rick_Bergen
Level 1
We eventually built a tool in C# to nightly download through the API all the data from both systems, compare it, and email us the differences.  It was a worthwhile effort initially revealing a substantial amount of differences due to sync problems resulting from such things in SFDC as validation rules, read-only fields, field level security, and formula fields, challenges related to merged records, deleted records, and/or records without a flow step to push them over to SFDC, and a small amount of bonafide Marketo bugs that they admitted to and I believe have in part already addressed.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Woot!

I came into the office this morning, and there were lead sync error messages from Marketo!
They had the actual error, and the leads that failed!

The only thing better would be to have the failure in the subject line, because we use gmail, and the messages are all clumped together because of the same subject line.

But, still, this is a HUGE improvement!

I am so happy!!!!