Book Image

Feature Management with LaunchDarkly

By : Michael Gillett
Book Image

Feature Management with LaunchDarkly

By: Michael Gillett

Overview of this book

Over the past few years, DevOps has become the de facto approach for designing, building, and delivering software. Feature management is now extending the DevOps methodology to allow applications to change on demand and run experiments to validate the success of new features. If you want to make feature management happen, LaunchDarkly is the tool for you. This book explains how feature management is key to building modern software systems. Starting with the basics of LaunchDarkly and configuring simple feature flags to turn features on and off, you'll learn how simple functionality can be applied in more powerful ways with percentage-based rollouts, experimentation, and switches. You'll see how feature management can change the way teams work and how large projects, including migrations, are planned. Finally, you'll discover various uses of every part of the tool to gain mastery of LaunchDarkly. This includes tips and tricks for experimentation, identifying groups and segments of users, and investigating and debugging issues with specific users and feature flag evaluations. By the end of the book, you'll have gained a comprehensive understanding of LaunchDarkly, along with knowledge of the adoption of trunk-based development workflows and methods, multi-variant testing, and managing infrastructure changes and migrations.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics
5
Section 2:Getting the Most out of Feature Management
11
Section 3: Mastering LaunchDarkly

Viewing experiment events within the Debugger

It is important to be able to confirm that experiment metric events are being tracked correctly by your application and that LaunchDarkly is recording them as expected. The Debugger shows summarized information for the metric events, just as it does with flags and users:

Figure 12.8 – Viewing experiment metrics within the Debugger

There are four key numbers that this screen presents. They include the following:

  • metrics
  • page view events
  • click events
  • custom events

The first is the total number of metrics detected during the session. The other three numbers relate to the types of metrics. These types of events were detailed in Chapter 11, Experiments. Viewing the totals of the metric types in this way, again, provides a quick overview of whether things are working as expected. If the Debugger is used on a test environment after implementing the tracking of a new metric, it can be...