LaunchDarkly Tips and Tricks: Vol. 1

Flag triggers give you the ability to integrate feature flag changes with different platforms. Out-of-the-box integrations include flag triggers for many observability platforms such as DataDog, New Relic, Dynatrace, and Honeycomb. Integrating flag triggers in these platforms allows you to trigger flag changes from within dashboarding tools and programmatically based on metric values and events within those platforms.

You can also create generic flag triggers that provide a URL to enable or disable specific feature flags. This URL can be tied into API requests as part of your development pipeline, or even provided to developers on teams to self-manage features without being forced to log into the user interface.

These URLs can be called on demand to enable or disable the targeting rules that manage features. Problem with a deployment late on a Friday evening after a last-minute feature release? Simply call the disable URL to turn the feature off.

This is an often overlooked but extremely powerful capability for integrating LaunchDarkly into other platforms. Learn more about Flag Triggers in our documentation.

Flag prerequisites

Flag prerequisites allow you to configure dependencies on other feature flag values in order to enable another feature. For example, you might develop a "new login" component as part of your "new UI" refresh, both of which are controlled by individual feature flags. It wouldn't make sense to roll out the "new login" feature flag before the "new UI," so you set the "new login" flag to require a "true" result from the "new UI" feature flag. This helps protect your user experience and ensure that features are being released in your intended order.

Using flag prerequisites to plot out the path of features you want to enable as a multi-part release allows you to truly orchestrate the rollout of a new set of capabilities across your application while protecting yourself from the bad experience of rolling out a feature before the rest of your platform is ready for it. These flag prerequisites can also leverage targeting rules to ensure that the right users are receiving the right features. Check out more examples in our flag prerequisites docs.