Last updated March 05, 2025

Heroku Events is an add-on for integrating your apps with Heroku’s real-time eventing platform. This add-on provides a simple way to subscribe to Salesforce Platform Events and Change Data Capture (CDC) events. It also provides a secure way to publish events to Salesforce, Data Cloud, and webhooks.

With Heroku Events, you can:

• Create event-driven apps: Develop complex event-driven applications that drive your business logic using the languages and tools of your choice.
• Scale elastically on the Heroku trusted infrastructure: Deploy and run your apps in a Heroku-managed elastic compute infrastructure.
• Deliver connected experiences: Subscribe and publish to your Salesforce and Data Cloud orgs securely and easily.

Use Cases

Real-Time Interaction and Insight Generation for Mobile Apps

Objective: I want to generate real-time insights based on user interactions and past data to improve the mobile app experience.

Scenario: A company has a mobile app that provides a more interactive and conversational job search experience. By subscribing to real-time interactions on the app and analyzing historical job applicant data from Salesforce and Data Cloud, the company can find the best jobs for each user. The app then publishes these insights to applicants and ensures that users receive relevant job recommendations quickly. The event-driven integration improves their overall satisfaction and likelihood of finding the right job.

Improve Customer Experience with Events and Agentforce

Objective: I want to improve the overall customer experience by augmenting Agentforce with data from external systems.

Scenario:

1. A customer submits a support ticket through a web form.
2. The submitted ticket publishes a “New Support Ticket” event to Salesforce with details about the customer, the customer’s issue, and priority.
3. When Agentforce receives the event, it can automatically create a case in Salesforce, assign it to the right agent, and send a notification to the customer.

In this scenario, Heroku Events subscribes to the Case entity from CDC event notifications. Agentforce agents can subscribe to External Service-centric events such as case updates or customer inquiries from another system. When a case is created or escalated, the Heroku action in Agentforce can analyze historical data in Salesforce and automatically send a personalized follow-up or alert a service agent. In addition, by using Heroku’s custom compute service, you can bring in data from external systems such as files that can help the agent better answer the support ticket.

Automated Compliance Monitoring in HLS Applications

Objective: I want to monitor changes in patient data and notify healthcare providers for compliance monitoring.

Scenario: In the healthcare and life sciences (HLS) industry, Health Cloud agents can monitor changes in patient data, devices, or treatment plans with Heroku Events. If there’s a compliance issue, the agent can start workflows with Health Cloud’s flows and notify healthcare providers or regulators to make sure they’re following standards and caring for the patients

For example, a device built on a Heroku Shield space ingests health device data that’s preprocessed and brought into Data Cloud. Heroku Events subscribes to Data Cloud data actions to monitor for changes in the data. Heroku Events also publishes events that initiate Health Cloud flows to make sure the right agent handles issues that arise.

Setting Up Heroku Events

Heroku Events CLI Plugin

The Heroku Events CLI plugin allows you to manage, subscribe to, and publish events with the Heroku Events add-on. Before connecting your Heroku apps to your Salesforce orgs, you must install the plugin.

Getting Started Guide

See our Getting Started with Heroku Events (Pilot) guide to provision the add-on and start using Heroku Events.

Authorizations

In Heroku Events, you create authorizations to other systems and platforms to allow Heroku Events to subscribe events from, or publish events to. You must authorize every Salesforce org that you want to subscribe to or publish events from. See Security for information on permissions.

Event Subscriptions

When the add-on subscribes to an event from an external service, such as platform events or Change Data Capture events in Salesforce, you’re creating a subscription. Platform events exchange real-time event data between Salesforce and external applications. Change Data Capture publishes changes to Salesforce records on objects the feature is enabled.

Heroku Events supports json format for subscriptions. For example:

$ curl -v -X POST $(heroku config:get HEROKUEVENTS_PUBLISH_URL)/publishInboundHerokuEventsPilot \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{"Context__c":{"string":"subscription"},"CreatedById":"005Ws000001eUtGIAU","CreatedDate":1733842936}'

Event Publications

When the add-on publishes events to an external event target such as Salesforce, you’re defining a publication. You can publish these types of events with Heroku Events:

• Salesforce Platform: publishes to a platform event in Salesforce
• Data Cloud: publishes to an Ingestion API connector endpoint in Data Cloud
• Webhook: publishes to an HTTP endpoint

Heroku Events publishes publications as a CloudEvent. CloudEvents is a specification for describing event data in common formats to provide interoperability across services, platforms, and systems. CloudEvents requires the following fields:

• data field, for example --data '{"Context__c":{"string":"IsThereAnybodyOutThere?2"}
• CreatedById and CreatedDate fields

$ curl -v -X POST $(heroku config:get HEROKUEVENTS_PUBLISH_URL)/publishInboundHerokuEventsPilot \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{"Context__c":{"string":"subscription"},"CreatedById":"005Ws000001eUtGIAU","CreatedDate":1733842936}'

Publish to Salesforce

You need these details to publish to Salesforce:

• App name: the name of your Heroku app (for example: herokuevents-app)
• Publication name: the name for the publication (for example: systemStatus)
• Authorization name: the name you gave to the Salesforce authorization in the events:authorizations:salesforce:create command (for example: example-org)
• Topic: the existing event subscription name to publish to (for example: /event/System_Status__e)

Here’s an example:

$ heroku events:publications:salesforce:create systemStatus -t "/event/System_Status__e" -A example-org -a herokuevents-app

Publish to Data Cloud

You need these details to publish to Data Cloud:

• App name: the name of your Heroku app (for example: herokuevents-app)
• Publication name: the name for the publication (for example: ordersDataTarget)
• Connector Value: the name of your Ingestion Data connector (for example: SalesConnector)
• Authorization name: the name you gave to the Salesforce authorization in the events:authorizations:salesforce:create command (for example: example-org)
• Object: the Salesforce object you want to publish to (for example: Orders)

Here’s an example:

$ heroku events:publications:datacloud:create ordersDataTarget -a herokuevents-app -c "SalesConnector" --object "Orders" -A example-org

Publish to a Webhook

You need these details to publish to a webhook:

• App name: the name of your Heroku app (for example: herokuevents-app)
• Publication name: the name for the publication (for example: systemStatus)
• URL: the webhook URL you want to publish to (for example: https://herokuevents-app.herokuapp.com/webhooks)

Here’s an example:

$ heroku events:publications:webhook:create systemStatus -u "https://herokuevents-app.herokuapp.com/webhooks" -a herokuevents-app

Event Streams

You can link a subscription and a publication to create a Heroku event stream. The event stream then sends events from the subscription to the publication. You can set filters in your event stream to subscribe and publish to specific events.

Create an Event Stream

To create an event stream, run the command:

$ heroku events:streams:create subAccountChange pubAccountChange -a herokuevents-app
Linking subAccountChange to pubAccountChange... done

Delete an Event Stream

When you unlink an event stream, you only unlink that particular event stream.

To delete an event stream, run the command:

$ heroku events:streams:destroy subAccountChange pubAccountChange -a herokuevents-app
Unlinking subAccountChange to pubAccountChange... done

Generate Events

You can test that your app is subscribed to events by using our event generator. This example generates an event that contains the current timestamp in its body (root.timestamp) every minute (1m).

$ heroku events:generate my-generator -i "1m" -m "root.timestamp = timestamp_unix()" -a herokuevents-app
Creating event generator my-generator

Logging and Metrics

You can view logging and metrics with Heroku’s standard tail logs with the heroku logs command.

Security

Heroku manages your connection and tokens to the org. The authorization you create uses the permissions of the user, so the authorizing user must have access to the platform event objects and the objects and fields Change Data Capture is subscribed to. See Platform Event Permissions and the Security Considerations for Change Data Capture for more information.

Considerations and Limitations

To give permissions for platform events in Salesforce, see Define and Manage Platform Events.

To give permissions for Change Data Capture for your Salesforce object, see Select Objects for Change Notifications in the User Interface.

Support

Submit all Heroku Events support and runtime issues via one of the Heroku Support channels. To submit a ticket for the pilot, mention the pilot name Heroku Events in the ticket subject.