Release Guardian
Read time: 4 minutes
Last edited: Aug 23, 2024
Release Guardian is available as an add-on to an Enterprise plan. To learn more, read about our pricing. If you want access to this feature, contact your LaunchDarkly account representative.
Overview
This topic explains how to use Release Guardian to monitor the health of flag releases and how to configure LaunchDarkly to take action on the results. Release Guardian is a suite of functionality that lets you guard rollouts by attaching metrics to flags to monitor for regressions. You can use Release Guardian to notify you or automatically roll back changes that have a negative effect on your app's performance.
About guarded rollouts
When you make a flag change, you can attach metrics to the flag to monitor changes in your app performance and guard against any regressions that result from the release. You can use metrics to track a variety of system health indicators and end-user behaviors, from engineering metrics like errors and latencies, to product metrics like clicks and conversions. To learn more, read Metrics.
You can connect metrics to LaunchDarkly using any of the following methods:
- Use one of our metrics integrations
- Call the metric import API
- Use a LaunchDarkly SDK to send custom events, and connect them to metrics
- Enable OpenTelemetry in a LaunchDarkly SDK, send the OpenTelemetry traces to LaunchDarkly, and connect them to metrics
You can monitor metrics on any flag rule, except rules serving a percentage rollout and those in use in a running experiment.
Regressions
When you attach metrics to a flag and then toggle the flag on or change the variation served, LaunchDarkly detects if the change is having a negative impact on your app or audience. This negative effect is called a "regression." You can configure LaunchDarkly to either notify you of the regression, or notify you of the regression and automatically roll back the release. To learn how LaunchDarkly detects regressions, read Time series charts and tables.