Getting started with engineering insights

Overview

This topic explains how to set up projects, environments, and applications, and begin using engineering insights.

Concepts

You should understand the following concepts before you set up your engineering insights dashboard.

Projects and environments

Engineering insights uses all the same projects and environments that you've already set up as part of your feature management. Projects let you manage multiple different business objectives from one LaunchDarkly account. Environments are organizational units contained within projects. They allow you to manage your feature flags throughout your development lifecycle.

To learn more, read Projects and Environments.

Applications

Applications are a part of your codebase for which you want to track deployments. Applications usually correspond to a single repository in your version control system. To learn more, read Applications.

Get started

To get started, first reach out to your Early Access Program (EAP) account contact and confirm that engineering insights is enabled for your account.

After you are part of the EAP program, you can access engineering insights from the product switcher menu in the LaunchDarkly user interface.

From your feature flag list, click the product switcher menu and choose Engineering insights:

The release frequency and flag health metrics are available as soon as you access engineering insights. They don't need any additional configuration. To learn more, read Release frequency and Flag health.

To enable other metrics, you can either:

• click Get started in the lower right corner and select a configuration step, or
• click your profile picture and select "Configure metrics."

The configuration instructions guide you through configuring deployment information, installing the GitHub app, and setting up code references:

You can click the arrow icon next to each step to view detailed instructions. Alternatively, you can follow the instructions below:

1. Send deployment information to LaunchDarkly
2. Install the GitHub app
3. Set up code references

After you complete these steps, you can confirm your setup.

Confirm your setup

To confirm you have set up everything correctly:

• Check for data on the Deployment frequency page. After you have set up and sent at least one deployment event, the deployment frequency chart and the deployments table will start filling with data.

• Check for data on the Lead time page. After you have set up the GitHub app, LaunchDarkly will start receiving commit and pull request (PR) information for all future PRs. LaunchDarkly will also backfill events for the last 90 days, although this can take up to 24 hours to complete. The lead time chart and the pull requests list will start filling with data.

Learn more

To learn more about engineering insights events and applications, explore the topics in this category:

• Send deployment information
• Install the GitHub app
• Set up code references
• Applications
• Deployment events API