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

Exploring user events within the Debugger

When attempting to understand what LaunchDarkly is doing with specific users, the Debugger offers a similar experience to that of feature flag evaluations. Again, the Debugger works in the same manner as Flag events by streaming live data and presenting it once opened. It highlights the key numbers and presents a breakdown of each event that is streamed to the Debugger:

Figure 12.6 – Viewing users within the Debugger

The Debugger records the following three types of user events to demonstrate what is happening within your application and the tool itself:

  • users seen: This shows the number of unique users that are seen during the time the Debugger is open.
  • index events: This indicates the total number of index events for users. It is triggered by the LaunchDarkly SDK for feature flag evaluations.
  • identify events: This shows the number of identity events that are triggered by explicit methods within...