Previewing Performance Assistant and Scale Center

Is your Salesforce application designed to meet the growing needs of your business? Can it gracefully handle a higher volume of traffic? How well does it deal with large data volumes of increasing complexity? In short, how does it adapt to changes in scale?

Many Salesforce customers confront scalability issues only after their users experience a drop in performance. Ideally, you could identify and correct defects in your implementation before they create costly problems in production. The best way to do this is to regularly test and analyze the performance of your system in a sandbox environment. At the “Architecting at Scale” session at Dreamforce ’21, we previewed two products we are currently building with a vision to help you do just that: Performance Assistant and Scale Center.

What are Performance Assistant and Scale Center?

Performance Assistant will be your end-to-end guide through the journey of performance testing for scalability. Whether you’re new to performance testing or simply want guidance on how to get up and running quickly, Performance Assistant will provide instructions, best practices, and ready-to-use templates to help you every step of the way.

Scale Center will be your single pane of glass to visualize your test results, investigate errors, and get actionable recommendations to improve performance. Together, these products will help you build performant and scalable applications on the Salesforce platform, saving you valuable time before and after release.

Both products go into private pilot in 2022. Let’s take a look at what teams involved in the private pilot can expect to see.

A central hub for performance testing

Performance Assistant will walk pilot users through each of the three phases of the performance testing process.

1. Prepare: In the prepare phase, Performance Assistant will help pilot users learn the basics of performance and scale testing, identify test requirements, avoid common pitfalls, and choose the appropriate testing tools.
2. Execute: Here, we’ll get to the nuts and bolts of designing a test model, calculate throughput performance, create a ramp-up schedule, and schedule the test with Salesforce.
3. Analyze and Optimize: After running the test, Performance Assistant will show pilot users how to interpret their results using Salesforce tools, including Scale Center, and recommend ways to make their system more performant. Armed with these results, pilot users can continue optimizing their test plan and integrate testing into their release cycle.

A consolidated view of scale-related metrics

During the private pilot, Scale Center will offer a consolidated view of important metrics and errors, including:

• A dashboard showing a high-level summary of an org’s performance, and charts of the system’s processing time, CPU usage, logins, and errors during the test period.

• The ability to run a performance analysis on spikes or errors observed during a test. Scale Center will even suggest actions pilot users can take to prevent the problems from recurring.

• The ability to compare results from two time periods side-by-side. Pilot users can compare performance test results before and after applying their updates to Salesforce.
• Insights for key platform areas: Reports, Integration, Role Hierarchy, Cache, and Lightning. Unlike investigations initiated by the user, these insights will be generated proactively, based on aggregate activity observed on each platform. Here’s a preview of an Integration Insights page for a customer running several Bulk API jobs. A scale bottleneck is detected:

In this example, the top line identifies the business process that was running when the bottleneck is observed (1), the severity of the bottleneck (2), and the potential improvement in Scalability Score if the bottleneck is resolved (3). Expanding Details reveals three separate issues contributing to the bottleneck, the reasons these issues are occurring, and recommended solutions.

What’s next?

We developed Performance Assistant and Scale Center to address the most common pain points our customers experience when addressing scalability issues. As we move toward a private pilot in 2022, you can help us continue shaping the direction of these products by providing additional feedback about functionality you’re hoping to see. Share your ideas and thoughts with us at https://sfdc.co/ScalePilotFeedback. To learn more and stay up to date on our progress, be sure to join the Salesforce Scalability Trailblazer Community.