The way we ship software today is broken.
For as long as we’ve been shipping software, release day has been the riskiest day of the week. It is when all the pressure builds from stakeholders, from customers, from ourselves. And for too long, engineers have accepted a release process that feels like rolling the dice: push it live, cross your fingers, and scramble when things go wrong.
This needs to change.
What is the cost of chaos? It’s not just downtime. It’s velocity. More firefighting means fewer features, slower innovation, and burned-out teams. Customer trust, loyalty, and confidence also take a hit, and those business outcomes all land squarely on the shoulders of developers —the same brilliant minds you have tasked with engineering the future.
Now AI is making the problem worse.
AI has multiplied the surface area of risk. Teams are shipping more code than ever, but 62% of AI-generated code contains bugs, creating even more chances for regressions to slip into production.
Yet the way we observe change hasn’t kept up. The result? Sleepless nights, blown weekends, and engineers carrying the weight of release risk without the guardrails to protect them. “Downtime” has become a trigger word for engineers, not the R&D relaxation vibes everyone else knows as creature comforts.
Trust me, there is nothing comforting about carrying a satellite phone that resembles an early 90s mobile brick on a backpacking trip, or the middle-of-the-night alert ping when you are on call.
The future is here: self-healing software, observable at the point of release
At LaunchDarkly, we believe engineers should expect more. More safety. More confidence. More visibility.
“Every engineer has a story about breaking something in production at the worst possible time. Early in my career, mine was wiping out 25,000 records with a single query on a Friday night. Guarded Releases changes that equation — instead of hoping nothing goes wrong, you ship with guardrails built in.” — Dylan O’Neill, engineer at LaunchDarkly
And that is why we have been hard at work bringing observability to the point of release… not hours later, not after an incident, but in the moment it matters most.
We think every release should be a Guarded Release.
Catch bugs before your customers do
Guarded Releases are the new normal: feature releases that are actively monitored, protected by automated guardrails, and capable of fixing themselves before customers ever feel an impact. It is the evolution of software delivery, one that removes the chaos of firefighting and replaces it with resilience by design.
Earlier this year, we introduced Guarded Releases: a safer way to ship software with automated guardrails and observability at the point of release.
Progressive Rollouts roll out gradually, target who sees what, and adjust in real time without redeploying. [▶ Watch the video]
Performance Thresholds track errors and latency as part of every rollout, so you know right away when something breaks. [▶ Watch the video]
Auto Rollbacks, if a change degrades performance, we roll it back automatically to the last good state. [▶ Watch the video]
But we didn’t stop there. We have been hard at work advancing the product with new features that help teams rapidly identify regressions, triage issues faster, and monitor rollout health at the feature flag level in real time so you can sleep more soundly. Guarded Releases keep deployments safe with observability at the point of release.
New Release Observability connects errors, sessions, and rollouts in real time.
With our latest features, you can stop guessing and start observing.
Error Monitoring
Find and fix issues before they spiral into incidents.
Errors are tied directly to feature flags, complete with stack traces, breadcrumbs, and real-time alerts. Instead of bouncing between logs, telemetry, and traces, you get a direct line to the root cause in the original source code. For developers: No more detective work across dashboards. You get clear, actionable insights, and your customers get uninterrupted experiences.
- Know the context of why errors are happening by tying them directly to feature flags with stack traces and breadcrumbs for faster debugging and less wasted time digging through noise.
- Work directly in your own code with source map integration that surfaces the error in TypeScript/JavaScript for precise fixes you can trust.
- See user impact in real time with instant alerts and related sessions for resolving problems before customers even notice.
Debug & Triage
Cut through the noise when something breaks.
One unified view connects errors, sessions, and rollout context in real time. When a regression is detected, you can trace it all the way down to the user experience. From session replay timelines to log attributes (like account ID, environment, or OS) to full flame graphs of slow endpoints, you see everything in context, end to end. Instead of hours lost piecing together clues, you get straight to the root cause. Less guesswork, less burnout, more headspace for what matters.
- Get to the root cause faster with a unified view of sessions, errors, logs, and traces for end-to-end visibility without tool-switching.
- Debug issues with richer context using log attributes and OpenTelemetry support for faster fixes informed by account, host, or OS data.
- Pinpoint performance bottlenecks instantly through flame graphs of traces for more reliable and performant user experiences.
Session Replay
See exactly what your users saw.
Session Replay records every interaction from clicks, page loads, to mouse movements along with console logs and network activity, so you can reproduce issues instantly. With structured attributes like browser, URL, or custom SDK events, you can search, filter, and jump straight into the moment something went wrong. No more back-and-forth trying to recreate a bug. You can solve issues faster, protect user trust, and get back to building the future.
- Reproduce user journeys visually with pixel-perfect recordings of clicks, DOM changes, and navigation for debugging without guesswork.
- Understand technical context instantly by pairing console logs and API requests with replays for faster resolution of styling, rendering, or request issues.
- Find the right session fast by searching attributes like browser, URL, or custom SDK events for quicker troubleshooting at scale.
Safety by default. Observable from the start.
Guarded Releases are not just a new feature set. They represent a cultural shift in how we think about software delivery. For the first time, engineers can hold releases to a higher standard: safety by default, resilient under pressure, and observable from the very first rollout.
That is the new normal, and it starts now. The future of software delivery is not about reacting faster. It is about never having to react at all.
Like what you read?
Get a demo
