SMS Notifications for Salesforce Outages
October 7, 2011 5 Comments
Admins have asked for a way to get notifications if/when there is a Salesforce outage (I can’t find the Idea right now. If you happen to have the URL, please put it in the comments.) Until now, I had to wait until a user encountered an error, go to http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ and find NA7 in the loooong list. This works ok for business hours (not ideal), but is horrible at 3am! I want to be notified if my instance is either in outage or has a degradation. At last I have a way!
ifttt.com is a new online service that lets you set-up rules for automating your internet life. Since Salesforce is a HUGE part of my internet life, I use ifttt to let me know if my instance (NA7) is in an outage or has a degradation.
Here’s my recipe: If outage then SMS me.
All I had to do was set-up my cell phone to accept SMS messages from ifttt and tell it which RSS feed to use. It took all of 5 minutes.
When you sign-up for ifttt, you can use my recipe and/or create your own! There’s lots of other non-Salesforce stuff you can do with ifttt, but this one is the one that’ll make my work-life easier!
UPDATE: With this weekend’s Winter ’12 upgrade, this recipe didn’t work! 😦 I’ve updated it to remove the “, degradation”. I think the comma is what broke it. We’ll know more next weekend as there is another outage on NA7! Sorry for any confusion!
Amber Neill Boaz - Salesforce Administrator 
I’m sure Salesforce doesn’t want to get into the SMS business, but this would be a great feature to have native as a Salesforce Admin. Perhaps even configurable from our profile page. Thanks for posting this Amber, this will be a great help to anyone who has to manage Salesforce for their company.
I was sure there was an idea on the IdeaExchange for something very similar…but I searched and searched and couldn’t find it. Oh well. I’d love to post this “fix” in the idea if anyone finds it!
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Here’s the issue brought up on Ideas:
https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000BrLjAAK
Any feedback on whether this still works with the current release? (Winter ’13)?
Thanks Ben! Vote early and often folks!