Table of Contents
- Field History Tracking in Salesforce Is Functional, but Limited
- Your Solution Should Track Every Change Across Salesforce
- Successful Processes Start With Meeting Compliance and Regulatory Requirements
- Historical Salesforce Data Helps Support Technical Teams
- Gain Scalable, Compliant Approach to Salesforce Data Change Tracking
CapStorm addresses these shortcomings with a solution designed for full, long-term visibility into field-level changes. By replicating Salesforce data into a customer-owned environment, CapStorm enables audit-ready, customizable tracking that aligns with operational, legal, and compliance needs.
Field History Tracking in Salesforce Is Functional, but Limited
Salesforce’s built-in Field History Tracking allows administrators to monitor up to 20 fields per object. With the Field Audit Trail add-on, that limit increases to 60. However, historical data is only retained for 18 months in the UI and 24 months via the API, after which it is permanently deleted.
Additionally, native history tracking offers limited context. It typically logs the old and new values, the user who made the change, and a timestamp. There is no built-in support for versioning entire records, tracing changes across related objects, or conducting multi-year investigations.
These limitations are manageable for basic use cases but insufficient for organizations that require persistent change tracking for audit, security, or operational analytics.
Your Solution Should Track Every Change Across Salesforce
CapStorm provides a self-hosted alternative that extends Salesforce history tracking beyond its native limitations. Through near real-time replication, CapStorm’s platform captures data, metadata, and schema changes into a normalized SQL environment under the organization’s control.
Key technical capabilities include:
- Delta-Based Replication: CapStorm continuously captures Salesforce record changes using API polling and stores each version in structured SQL tables.
- Full Object Versioning: Historical records are stored as discrete versions, allowing analysts to reconstruct the complete state of a record at any point in time.
- Field-Level Granularity: All fields across all standard and custom objects can be tracked, eliminating the 20- or 60-field cap imposed by Salesforce.
- Custom Retention Schedules: Organizations can define retention policies by object or field to support long-term compliance or short-term operational needs.
- Secure Deployment: Replicated data resides within the organization’s infrastructure, whether on-premises or in a private cloud, ensuring full control over access and location.
This architecture creates a durable, tamper-resistant record of every change made within Salesforce, far exceeding what’s possible with native tooling.
Successful Processes Start With Meeting Compliance and Regulatory Requirements
CapStorm is frequently adopted by organizations with strict audit, compliance, and data governance mandates. The platform’s ability to deliver long-term, immutable change tracking supports adherence to frameworks such as HIPAA or GDPR.
Common compliance features include:
- Append-Only Audit Tables: Optional configurations prevent overwrites and deletions to maintain forensic traceability.
- Regional Data Storage: Supports compliance with data residency laws by storing data in specific geographies or private clouds.
- Comprehensive Attribution: Change logs include user IDs, timestamps, and the originating interface (UI, API, integration), creating a complete audit trail.
These capabilities help legal, compliance, and information security teams reduce audit preparation time, respond to inquiries with confidence, and mitigate risk across the organization.
Historical Salesforce Data Helps Support Technical Teams
In addition to compliance benefits, CapStorm provides technical teams, such as DevOps engineers, data architects, and analysts, with persistent access to historical Salesforce data in a familiar relational database format.
This access supports several critical use cases:
- Time-Based Analysis: Enables reporting on how records have changed over time, including trend analysis and KPI evolution.
- Snapshot Restoration: Allows reconstruction of individual records or datasets from any previous state for rollback, validation, or forensic analysis.
- Version-Aware Sandbox Seeding: Enhances test environments by providing realistic, time-stamped data states for more accurate QA and staging.
Unlike native Salesforce tools, which restrict access to historical change data and require specialized APIs, CapStorm exposes a clean, queryable layer that integrates seamlessly into existing analytics and DevOps workflows.
Gain Scalable, Compliant Approach to Salesforce Data Change Tracking
While Salesforce Field History Tracking serves a basic purpose, it cannot scale to meet the demands of enterprise compliance, long-term investigations, or cross-functional data transparency. CapStorm provides an infrastructure-independent solution that supports continuous change capture, secure retention, and advanced auditing, entirely within the organization’s control.
By maintaining a complete historical view of Salesforce data, CapStorm empowers teams to meet regulatory requirements, investigate issues with confidence, and build a future-proof foundation for data governance.
Organizations that depend on accurate, long-term change tracking don’t need to settle for built-in limitations. CapStorm turns every field update into a reliable, queryable asset, ready for audits, analytics, or recovery at a moment’s notice.
Ready to learn more? Explore how CapStorm can help your team gain full ownership of Salesforce field history by speaking with an expert today.
