Guarded rollouts

Overview

This topic explains how to use metrics with guarded rollouts to monitor the performance of flag releases and configure LaunchDarkly to take action on the results.

When you begin serving a new flag variation, using a guarded rollout progressively increases traffic to the new variation over time while monitoring chosen metrics for regressions, until 100% of your audience is receiving the new variation. If LaunchDarkly detects a regression before you reach 100%, it can stop the release and send you a notification.

You can guard a rollout on any flag rule, except rules already serving a percentage rollout or progressive rollout, and those in use in a running experiment.

Guarded rollouts are one of several options that LaunchDarkly provides to help you release features to production safely and gradually. To learn about other options for releasing features, read Releasing features with LaunchDarkly.

Metrics and guarded rollouts

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

Regressions

When you attach metrics to a flag and then start a guarded rollout, 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 as well as automatically roll back the release.