Automatically Catch Bugs Before They're Outages: Meet Release Guardian

In today's fast-paced tech landscape, staying ahead of the curve is crucial. For software delivery teams, this means constantly innovating while mitigating risks and reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR). That’s where Release Guardian comes in.

LaunchDarkly is changing the game for software delivery teams with Release Guardian, which enables teams to uncover and automatically remediate software performance problems before they become customer issues. It de-risks your software changes by monitoring critical metrics on every release to prevent performance issues.

Where there's smoke, there's fire

The struggle to balance fast development with seamless performance is real. And when incidents do occur, it's critical for business to bounce back from them as quickly as possible. One study found that over 80% of performance incidents can be traced to software changes. And incidents are expensive, with approximately 50% of costs going to finding and fixing bugs over the lifetime of a mature software product.[1]

Software delivery teams face the constant battle of reducing MTTR and ensuring the smooth functioning of their applications. The disconnect between their application performance management (APM) tools and feature management systems only compounds this challenge. This disconnect often leads to inefficiencies, a lack of visibility, and a serious race against the clock, making it challenging to detect and resolve issues quickly.

To make matters worse, issues within smaller releases such as incremental rollouts and early access releases often aren't detected by APMs because the regressions are lost in the noise of all of the other metrics in the system. This means that incidents are detected later, outages are more serious, and developer velocity is slowed.

But what if you didn't have to compromise engineering velocity for safety?

With Release Guardian, you don’t have to.

Automatic risk mitigation and resolution

Control your deployment

With Release Guardian, ensure your software changes are safe—no more monitoring different dashboards or waiting for bug reports. Embed monitoring directly into every release: send events to LaunchDarkly in as little as one line of code.

Ingest telemetry and monitoring data from your existing tools through direct integrations with tools like Segment, support for OpenTelemetry and Sentry, as well as LaunchDarkly SDKs and bulk import APIs.
Set customizable duration monitoring, including out-of-the-box timeframes, to seamlessly schedule releases by date and time.
Define precise audience exposure, to help ensure features reach targeted users at the right time for safe progressive rollouts and early issue detection.

Proactively monitor and mitigate risk in real-time

When things go wrong, don’t get lost in the time-suck of figuring out which software change caused a problem. Reduce the stress and toil of issue debugging by automatically correlating issues with the problematic change—and minimize the blast radius before it degrades overall performance.

Proactively monitor every release for issues with performance and core business metrics during the critical initial release window.
Set up actionable alerts for identified degradation in key metrics, know exactly what change caused the issue and notify the relevant teams to take action with one-click rollback via Slack or email.
Auto roll-back failed releases to help safeguard stability and provide uninterrupted customer experiences by instantly reverting bad changes to a safe state without re-deploys or hot fixes, so teams can iterate with confidence.

Deliver better software with confidence

Help ensure your releases don’t compromise product quality—while maintaining high engineering velocity. Leveraging release-level insights in real-time helps teams understand how software changes impact the end-user experience.

Correlate key performance metrics like errors and latency to targeted release audiences to understand if changes in the release impact users.
Learn how the introduced changes affect metrics over time with persistent tracking of rollout results between variations.

"Release Guardian closes the gap between your monitoring systems and your release process, allowing you to measure your feature—not just your application as a whole. Think of it like a fire alarm that doesn’t just detect smoke, but knows that you left your oven on and can automatically turn it off." — Rachel RoseFigura, Product Manager, LaunchDarkly

Are you ready for the future of software development?

Mitigating risks, executing decisions with precision, and detecting issues before they escalate into a fire could soon be your reality with LaunchDarkly. Don't miss the opportunity to be among the first to experience our newest cutting-edge solution.

Register for our Tech Talk on Release Guardian

Unlock the future of application monitoring and feature management. LaunchDarkly knows exactly when and whom you released your change to, allowing you to monitor every release.

In an upcoming Tech Talk, we'll tackle the nuts and bolts of Release Guardian. Plus find out how you can be among the first to access this product to test it out with your teams.

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[1] Quocirca, Damage Control – The impact of critical IT incidents