I conceptualized and built this to add efficiency and transparency for an team member or external member who wanted to receive monitoring for their perspective areas of interest.
The Marketing Cloud does not have many product solutions for global or user specific monitoring needs.
Making use the SOAP API Describe method: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.noversion.mc-apis.meta/mc-apis/describe.htm, it’s fairly easy to create a a simple UI around retrievable object properties.
** not all object properties are retrievable regardless of what the describe method returns
This simple interface allows any user to create a monitor for any API Object listed in a simple data extension.
From there we can simply design an interface that allows a users to select any API object, properties, subject, monitor cadence, filters, and ordering for their monitor.
For the monitor below it is set to send a message every day of the week on every hour if the specific triggered send is not actively running.
This design reduces an incredible amount of email noise generated by the Marketing Cloud Applications standard monitoring which is rudimentary. Essentially it only allows insight to some automations and activities when they have completed. For an hourly cadence that is too much noise and not usually what a user wants to monitor.
The API calls are then stored in a data extension.
An automation runs hourly and picks up whatever monitors are in that hourly cadence. There is a fancy query that is responsible for detecting monitors in the right cadence which I’ll do a post on separately.
A script activity executes the API calls and stores the results.
A verification step ensures the automation does not try to send the email if there aren’t any records stored in the sendable data extension.
The email sends are built from the stored results using very simple GTL (Guided Template Language).
Here are a few samples.
