As a Salesforce consultant, you’re probably quite comfortable with debugging flows. The Debug button is highly visible, and it’s easy to follow the flow’s path and see variable values.
Of course, there are several other ways to debug functionality. Here are three for your consideration.
Apex Jobs
If you’ve ever written apex classes, this one will be equally familiar as flows. Available from the Setup menu, this is a great way to see the outcomes of scheduled apex and queueable classes.
Developer Console – Debug Logs
To see the actual SQL statements executed and other debug statements in your apex code, use debug logs. This is available from either the Developer Console or from Setup > Debug Logs.
If you’re using an integrated development environment (IDE) like VS Code, you can also request and download these logs for easier reading.
Chrome Developer Tools
This last way isn’t as well known as the previous two. Within Chrome, you can open developer tools and the inspector tool. With the tab “Network” open, whenever you click buttons, it shows the requests and responses made between you and Salesforce.
This is a great way to debug managed packages on a client’s system.
The takeaway
The more comfortable you are with debugging tools, the better consultant you become.