Inspect a Salesforce Platform Event before you blame middleware

A downstream system goes quiet. The instinct is to open the middleware, the queue, the connector — anything but Salesforce. Nine times out of ten, that's the wrong place to start.

Before you trace the rest of the integration, confirm the source of truth: did Salesforce actually publish the event you expected, with the payload you expected?

Watch the event on the wire

Subscribe to the platform event channel directly and trigger the action that should fire it. If nothing shows up, your problem is upstream — a flow that didn't run, a validation rule that blocked the record, a governor limit you didn't see.

# Salesforce CLI — stream a platform event channel
sf api request streaming \
  --channel /event/Order_Event__e \
  --replay -2

Compare what comes across to what you assumed. Field API names, data types, and null values are where assumptions quietly die — a Status__c that's blank, an amount that's a string, a correlation id that never got set.

Then, and only then, look downstream

Once you've confirmed the event published with a clean payload, you've cut the problem in half. Now the question is narrow: why didn't the consumer act on a message you can see with your own eyes? Replay id gaps, subscriber errors, and retry storms all live here — but you're debugging one system instead of five.

This is the whole philosophy behind an Integration Spine™: every system exposes what it did, so you can trust the flow instead of guessing at it.