Marketo Admin - Steps to follow after service interruption

[Victor_Herrero]

Hi everyone, 

I would like to know if anyone has tips regarding some sort of systematic checks, a process, or steps that they follow after there has been a service interruption / outage. 

Of course trying to figure out what automated processes might have failed and retrigger, figure out if failed integrations can be retried, etc. comes to mind, but can that even be done? 

Wouldn't we need to figure out what emails or other logic would have triggered and for whom during the time of the interruption, create batch clones of it and run them all? 

This sounds a bit like an impossible task to me. Am I missing something?

Thank you in advance for your insights!

[Mariah_Mattick]

Hi Victor - this one would probably require a little more finesse than simply using things like the Notifications tab or simply checking the CRM sync, and comes down more to prioritizing. I'd start by outlining the highest priority processes that would be the most affected by a system outage - things like contact us, syncs to CRM, data management, scoring, etc. Maybe start with the top 5-10 and then build from there. From there, smart lists would probably be the most efficient tools to have set up that allow you to audit if someone missed a process (you could also have batch campaigns set up and ready as well). The contact us example may be something like 'filled out form AND not synced to SFDC'. 

And a quick note in terms of the failed integrations - one thing we've done at least for our webinar integration is to create an alert in case someone hits the status of Webinar Registration Error so we can ensure they get registered ASAP. 

Good luck!

[Victor_Herrero]

@Mariah_Mattick 

Thank you for your answer, those are very good points.

I think the idea of choosing the most business critical processes and have a system for those already in place makes sense. 

We already have lists that we check daily for people who fail to sync. Maybe we could create more lists like these for the process we consider critical, like our main automated email campaigns. 

I would argue thought that precisely scoring is  not one I would prioritize to recover. Scoring is one of our most complex systems with most granular campaings, and just trying to figure out which of the campaigns didn't trigger and for whom would take a very significant amount of time. 

Maybe you could explain why scoring is one of your top things to review and / or fix? 

Regarding the automatic alert for webinar errors - where does the alert originate? From your webinar partner? 

I wonder if there are other 

[Mariah_Mattick]

Hey Victor! I mentioned scoring in the spirit of ensuring people that need follow up from sales, get passed to that team, so it's more broadly focusing on key buyer journey processes. If you use a traditional lifecycle process, MQL could be that key element there. 

As for the webinar error, we actually have our own alert process in Marketo. This sends an alert email to myself - the trigger listens for Program Status Changed = Registration Error and the email uses the {{trigger.name}} token so the program that caused the error is identified in the email.