Trailhead by Salesforce: Detective Learning with Event Monitoring!

If you are thinking of learning Salesforce, or you already know Salesforce and want to update your knowledge and get up to speed with the latest features, a very good way to do it is to use Trailhead, an interactive and intuitive learning tool provided by Salesforce to guide you through the process of learning about the Salesforce1 platform while having fun. Your achievements will be rewarded with points and badges.

There are now 30 modules, 7 trails and 6 projects available in Trailhead, aimed at both admins and developers, so you can choose the one that best suits your needs.

The latest Trailhead releases are the following:

- Admin Trail - CRM, with three modules
- Dreamforce Trail with Get Ready for Dreamforce module
- Event Monitoring

Out of the new content, today I will be focusing on the Event Monitoring module. I have recently been carrying on some investigations in one of the Salesforce orgs that I usually work on to find out who did something really dodgy on a trigger, and I find it fascinating all the things you can find out when you dig in a bit deeper, so doing the Trailhead module on Event Monitoring would help me become a better Salesforce Detective.

It takes about 45 minutes to finish the whole module, broken down into 15 minute blocks that you can follow as you find gaps through your day, or whenever you need a break from whatever you are doing. These are the three blocks for the Event Monitoring module, each of them can give you up to 100 points, a total of 300!

Get Started with Event Monitoring: This is an introduction to Event Monitoring, explaining what you can achieve with it and defining a few basic concepts. The way this block is structured makes you want to keep reading and it definitely catches your attention.

Query Event Log Files: This section drives you through one of the most useful tools in Salesforce, the Workbench, which allows you to inspect the Event Log Files in a very intuitive way.

Trailhead shows your module progress as you play along

Download and Visualize Event Log Files: This last block gives you details about how to download the Event Log Files and the format in which the files are generated, so that it becomes easy for the end user to read and understand the file's content.

So once you complete your module, you'll get your points and new modules are suggested to you. I encourage you to take on the different modules, even if you already know Salesforce, as it gives you other points of view and approaches you wouldn't have thought yourself...

I wish I could have used Trailhead when I first started learning Salesforce, it makes it a lot easier to learn, more in line with the online world we live in.

And if you are not sure how to get started with Trailhead, you can alwasy check for Salesforce User Groups in your area; you will always find someone there to ask for help or even organise a joint Trailhead session.

Thanks very much for reading this post, I hope you found it useful and enjoyed getting started with Trailhead.