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Currently, our Web Development team is trying to mop up years of scattered coding techniques (PHP based sites), and in recent weeks, something disturbing has happened. Our API calls to Salesforce have quadrupled. (yes, 4x normal, really closer to 5x) It has been a few weeks, and eventually, SF is going to contact me and start discussing several THOUSAND dollars in fees for the increased calls (already investigated that fact). :-/

Attached I'm including a graph of our API usage for the last several days. Despite the very odd fluke of the 9th having NORMAL levels of usage (otherwise for 3 weeks it's been consistently what is seen per-day in this graph), we cannot figure out what is causing this.

On the Salesforce side, after two exchanges on different Cases with Support (sigh), I only end up with the "User" login you can download from the User page (we have a designated "robot" user who does all API calls). That user shows clearly that the two IPs for our balanced web servers ARE the ones causing this. But there is nothing inherent in Salesforce to show the path to a script / the URL, or anything else helpful. Literally just IP addresses. Reports do not help as they don't even SHOW this activity, much less what URL or script is making the call to Salesforce.

On the Apache/Linux side (as I am not a guru on such things by any means), no one knows of anything preinstalled or that can be added that would show "this script is calling out to this IP/ Site/ etc" so we could log it globally on the site and see what script(s) are causing this (very likely an "include" script, possibly one of the ones used for webinar registration or whatever).

The graph shows that the highs are during our (US) business hours. We do send out quite a bit of opted-in email marketing, and the result is people visiting the website and registering for webinars, using our Moodle, accessing other items. Various things do call out to Salesforce at different times. BUT we also have cron (timed) jobs out of vBulletin that run scripts anywhere from once a day to once an hour to once every 15 minutes. We've investigated those and haven't isolated one doing this yet (plus, none of their timings seems to fit the low-high pattern in the graph attached). There are also some URLs used internally to add people to Salesforce or that involve calling OUT so Salesforce via PHP pages.

So... I'm reaching out... hoping beyond hope that someone knows of a way to figure this out.

  • Something in Linux or Apache that would show calls "to Salesforce" and include exatly WHAT is calling (script path+name, app, etc - 99% certain it's a PHP script) (which would be either by domain or by IPs - IPs are numerous and unknown what the full range is anyway).
  • Something in Salesforce that Support is missing (in Tier 1's infinite wisdom).
  • Something on AppExchange (I've searched, but...) that could be added to Salesforce.

Something! Help? Thanks for any insights.

This is an automated notification sent to you at your request by salesforce.com.

Your organization has made 627982 API calls within the last 24 hours.
This is 462% of your organization's 24-hour API call limit of 136000 
calls. You will receive this notice once every 3 hours until your 
organization's API usage drops below 90% of your 24-hour call 
limit (122400 calls).

The graph is from left to right labelled with Hour-Day (so from July 02 at 1900 to July 10 at 2200)

enter image description here

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    It may be possible to change the User on each of your PHP apps so that you can pin down which is causing the issue.
    – Matt K
    Commented Jul 11, 2013 at 20:36
  • Wow. That's so insanely simple, it annoys me that I didn't think of it. We do keep ONE unused license at all times (just checked to make sure someone didn't steal it). This may be the way to go until someone perhaps shows a way to do this otherwise. Just create Robot-2 and move the ones we SUSPECT and watch traffic on both accounts. (sigh) Thanks so much. This is the beauty of Stack Exchange. (warm fuzzy feeling returning...)
    – AMM
    Commented Jul 11, 2013 at 20:41
  • possible duplicate of Populating Client ID for API Call reporting purposes
    – AMM
    Commented Jun 30, 2014 at 14:49

1 Answer 1

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Try using a separate User for each app that accesses the Salesforce API. Once they're all separated, you can check which one has jumped in activity. Then, when you've found the source, you can switch it back to a single User.

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4
  • Thanks again... using this until we either find it OR someone says "oh, just use X and it tells you exactly which script ran each call" blah blah blah. Thanks!!!!!!!!!!
    – AMM
    Commented Jul 11, 2013 at 20:48
  • You're welcome; hope you find the issue!
    – Matt K
    Commented Jul 11, 2013 at 20:58
  • 90k-100k API calls... to over 600k average/24hours... yeah.. it.. WILL be found. Ugh. I'm sure SF wouldn't mind billing us for these calls - I'm thankful, just like with Storage overages, they are very relaxed on pursuing these things.
    – AMM
    Commented Jul 11, 2013 at 21:00
  • Accepting this answer as (from a debugging/ breaking things point of view) it is the right answer in my opinion. Should have accepted it long ago - my bad.
    – AMM
    Commented Mar 13, 2017 at 13:47

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