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title: Smart Alerts for Salesforce – Overview
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locale: en-us
portal_url: https://docs.salesforce.com/admin/current/en-us/platform/264-0-0/backup_recover_o_smart_alerts_overview.md
canonical_url: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=platform.backup_recover_o_smart_alerts_overview.htm&release=264.0.0&type=5
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description: Backup & Recover Smart Alerts tell you about critical changes to your Salesforce SaaS data and metadata, such as deletions and corruptions. Configure alerts that align with your company's priorities and compliance requirements to reduce false positives and enhance data management.
products:
  - Security
  - Salesforce Platform
release: "264"
---
# Smart Alerts for Salesforce – Overview

Backup & Recover Smart Alerts tell you about critical changes to your Salesforce SaaS data and metadata, such as deletions and corruptions. Configure alerts that align with your company's priorities and compliance requirements to reduce false positives and enhance data management.

## Objects to Monitor

Analysis of Backup & Recover usage across all of our customers showed that five Salesforce standard objects had more frequent problems that required restoration and repair:

- Accounts
- Cases
- Contacts
- Leads
- Opportunities

To a lesser degree, we see Salesforce customers running recovery operations on Attachments, Users, and Tasks.

You can also identify objects to configure Smart Alerts based on mission criticality and data usage. Custom objects in Salesforce are typically the most used, and change more often than standard objects, putting them at risk of data loss or corruption. For highly regulated industries, it's advisable to configure Smart Alerts on objects that contain sensitive data, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI). Any object that is required to run a business deserves the most monitoring, so consider setting multiple different Smart Alerts on such objects. Having multiple alerts trigger at the same time will raise the alarm.

## How to Reduce False-Positive Smart Alerts

There's significant variation in how organizations use SaaS applications, so one Smart Alert rule is rarely effective for everyone.

Detecting unexpected deletion is generally the most effective uses of Smart Alerts, with the fewest false positives. For your Objects that should be watched, it is best to set a Smart Alert for at least 25% of records being deleted or setting a specific number of records being deleted.

There are several factors that can contribute to false positives in Smart Alerts, resulting in noise and alert fatigue. Configuring a percentage change threshold on objects with fewer than 150 records has a high false-positive rate because small changes equate to a high percentage change.

For many SaaS applications, it can be difficult to discern between normal versus abnormal inserts and updates. An effective solution can be to set Smart Alerts with a high threshold value of inserts and updates on objects that have high risk of corruption, such as active integrations and frequent changes.

## Metadata Smart Alerts

Configuring Smart Alerts on metadata changes can proactively detect unwanted modifications to the SaaS schema. For instance, when Salesforce had a major issue with permissions in 2020 customers were among the first to know about the permission issue because they received a Smart Alert that there were some unusual changes within their metadata.

## When are Statistical Outlier Smart Alerts Useful

Smart Alerts for statistical outliers detect unusual changes to an object's data. The system looks at changes over a 62-day period to establish what amount of change to an object is expected. If a new backup has significantly more or less changes to the object, an alert is triggered. This helps identify issues like unexpected data deletions or unauthorized modifications.

These alerts are most effective for objects with a consistent usage pattern, like those that follow a normal distribution of modifications over time, or for objects that rarely or never change. To avoid false alarms, only use statistical outliers for these kinds of objects.

- **[Set Up Smart Alerts](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=platform.backup_recover_o_setup_smart_alerts.htm&release=264.0.0&type=5)**  
    Get notified of specific changes in your Salesforce SaaS data and metadata when you define rules for Backup & Recover Smart Alerts to monitor that data. Set a percentage change threshold to minimize false positives and proactively detect unwanted schema modifications.
- **[Set Up Personal Notifications](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=platform.backup_recover_o_setup_my_notifications.htm&release=264.0.0&type=5)**  
    Control email notifications you receive for Salesforce services, such as backups, jobs, data privacy, permissions, and alerts. Customize notifications for individual services to stay informed about the features that are important to you.