Whether you're an SFMC admin managing a handful of automations or an operations team responsible for hundreds across multiple business units, you need a repeatable process to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. This checklist covers the checks every SFMC team should be running — daily, weekly, and monthly.
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Daily Checks
Automation Studio
- Review all automation statuses — Look for any automation showing "Error" or "Stopped" status. Filter by "Last Run" to catch automations that should have run but didn't.
- Verify file drop automations fired — These are the most commonly missed failures because "no file" means "no run" which means "no error."
- Check query activity results — Confirm that SQL queries returned expected row counts. A query that normally returns 10,000 rows returning 0 is a red flag.
- Review import activity logs — Look for partial imports, rejected rows, or unexpected zero-row imports.
Journey Builder
- Verify active journeys are injecting — Check that journeys showing "Running" are actually processing contacts, not just sitting idle.
- Review journey error logs — Look for contacts stuck in wait steps longer than expected or falling to error paths.
- Check entry source populations — Ensure data extensions feeding journeys are being populated as expected.
Sends and Deliverability
- Review triggered send statuses — Confirm all critical triggered sends (welcome, transactional, password reset) are active.
- Check bounce rates — A sudden spike in bounces can indicate a list quality issue or a blocklisting event.
- Monitor send volumes — Verify daily send counts are within expected ranges.
Weekly Checks
Data Health
- Audit data extension row counts — Compare current counts to the previous week. Significant deviations warrant investigation.
- Review subscriber growth/churn — Track new subscribers vs. unsubscribes to spot trends early.
- Check data extension retention policies — Ensure DEs with retention policies are properly purging old records.
Performance Trending
- Review automation run times — An automation that used to complete in 5 minutes now taking 30 minutes is an early warning sign of data growth issues.
- Check API usage — Monitor REST and SOAP API call volumes against your allocation.
- Review error trends — Are the same automations failing repeatedly? Address root causes, not just symptoms.
Security and Access
- Review user login activity — Check for failed login attempts or logins from unexpected locations.
- Audit API integration credentials — Verify that all active integrations are authorized and credentials haven't expired.
Monthly Checks
Capacity Planning
- Review send limit utilization — If you're consistently using 80%+ of your send limit, plan for an upgrade before you hit the ceiling.
- Audit automation inventory — Identify and deactivate automations that are no longer needed. Zombie automations waste processing resources and make monitoring harder.
- Review data extension storage — SFMC has storage limits. Track growth trends to avoid hitting them unexpectedly.
Documentation and Process
- Update automation documentation — Ensure your team knows what each automation does, who owns it, and what to do when it fails.
- Review alert routing — Are alerts going to the right people? Has the team changed since alerts were configured?
- Test disaster recovery procedures — Can you restore a critical automation or data extension from backup if needed?
Automating This Checklist
If you're reading this and thinking "there's no way my team has time to do all of this manually" — you're right. That's exactly the problem this checklist exposes.
Most teams realistically cover about 20% of these checks. The other 80% are either done sporadically or not at all. That's how silent failures happen.
The solution is automation. Tools like Martech Monitoring can handle the daily and weekly checks automatically — verifying automation statuses, tracking data extension health, monitoring journey injection rates, and alerting your team the moment something deviates from expected behavior.
Our free tier covers up to 5 automations with daily checks — enough to protect your most critical workflows while you evaluate whether full monitoring is right for your team.
Download the Checklist
We'll be publishing a downloadable PDF version of this checklist soon. Drop us a note if you'd like us to send it to you when it's ready.
Take Action on Your SFMC Monitoring
Download the free SFMC Monitoring Checklist — 27 critical items to monitor, with recommended frequencies and alert thresholds for each.
Or watch the product demo to see how Martech Monitoring automates all of this for you — catching Journey failures, Automation errors, and Data Extension issues in minutes, not days.
Start monitoring free — no credit card required.
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