Interview Prep
The production incident question
Practice a structured answer when a Salesforce integration suddenly stops working.
By Vishal Verma · Reviewed October 5, 2026
Scenario
An integration worked yesterday. Today users report missing updates. What do you do?
Build your answer
- Confirm the business impact, affected transactions, and when the failures began.
- Review recent deployments, credential changes, external availability, and relevant logs without exposing sensitive payloads.
- Trace one failed transaction across Salesforce and the external system with a correlation ID.
- Identify whether the fault is authentication, validation, limits, timeout, or downstream processing.
- Communicate a recovery plan. Retry only when duplicate processing is controlled.
- Fix the cause, verify recovery, and improve monitoring.
A strong answer names your decisions, the evidence you need, and the people you involve. Avoid guessing the cause before investigating.