If you manage Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), you’ve probably experienced it: an automation silently fails, emails stop sending, and nobody notices until a stakeholder asks why campaign numbers tanked. By then, the damage is done — missed revenue, angry customers, and a fire drill to figure out what went wrong.
The truth is, SFMC doesn’t tell you when things break. There’s no built-in alerting for failed automations, stalled journeys, or data extension anomalies. You’re expected to check manually — and in a platform running dozens of automations across multiple business units, that’s a full-time job nobody signed up for.
What Can Go Wrong in SFMC?
More than you’d think. Here are the most common silent failures we see across SFMC instances:
1. Automation Failures
Automations can fail for dozens of reasons — expired credentials, schema mismatches, file drops that never arrived, SQL query errors. SFMC logs these failures, but unless someone checks Automation Studio daily, they go unnoticed.
2. Journey Builder Stalls
Journeys can stop injecting contacts without throwing a visible error. A misconfigured entry source, a depleted data extension, or a deactivated triggered send can all cause a journey to silently stop working while still showing a “Running” status.
3. Data Extension Anomalies
When a data extension that normally receives 10,000 records per day suddenly receives 500 — or 50,000 — something has changed upstream. Without monitoring, you won’t catch this until the downstream effects cascade through your campaigns.
4. Send Limit Approaching
SFMC enforces send limits per business unit. If you’re approaching your limit and don’t know it, sends will start failing with cryptic errors that are difficult to debug in the moment.
Why Manual Monitoring Doesn’t Scale
Most teams handle this with some combination of:
- A shared spreadsheet of “things to check”
- A junior admin logging into Automation Studio each morning
- Hoping someone notices when numbers look off in reports
This works when you have 5 automations. It falls apart at 20. At 50+, it’s impossible — especially across multiple business units.
What Proactive Monitoring Looks Like
Proactive SFMC monitoring means you get an alert before a stakeholder asks “why didn’t that email go out?” Here’s what an effective monitoring setup should do:
- Check automation status on a schedule — every hour, or every 15 minutes for critical automations
- Alert on failures immediately — via email, Slack, or Teams, depending on your team’s workflow
- Track data extension row counts — flag anomalies based on historical patterns
- Monitor journey health — verify that journeys are actively injecting and processing contacts
- Log everything — maintain a historical record for troubleshooting and audit purposes
Build vs. Buy
Some teams build internal monitoring using WSProxy, SSJS, and webhook integrations. This works, but requires ongoing developer time to maintain, and often breaks when SFMC updates its API or when the developer who built it leaves the team.
Purpose-built monitoring tools like Martech Monitoring provide this out of the box — automated checks, intelligent alerts, and historical trending — without the maintenance burden. We offer a free tier that monitors up to 5 automations with daily checks, so you can see the value before committing.
The Bottom Line
SFMC is a powerful platform, but it’s not designed to tell you when things go wrong. If your team is spending hours each week manually checking automation status, or worse, finding out about failures from stakeholders, it’s time to automate your monitoring.
The cost of undetected failures — in missed revenue, damaged sender reputation, and team stress — far exceeds the cost of monitoring. Start with the basics: know what’s running, know when it breaks, and fix it before anyone else notices.