Introducing Guarded Releases: confidently innovate with safer, smarter software deployments

It’s startling, but true: the vast majority of software bugs come from new code changes, leading to costly outages, customer churn, and developer burnout. Any teams faced with late-night PagerDuty alerts, early-morning “war rooms,” and constant firefighting know too well the resource and morale drain they can have. And when those PagerDuty notifications hit, it’s always at the worst possible time, interrupting life and work. 

But what if you didn’t have to choose between speed and safety? Today, LaunchDarkly is announcing Guarded Releases as a solution to flip this approach, equipping teams with proactive safeguards that enable fast, resilient updates while minimizing risk. Now, teams can shift from crisis management to driving productivity, delivering value, and enhancing customer experiences.

The pressure and pitfalls of rapid software releases

To stay competitive, organizations are under pressure to release quickly, but this often compromises software reliability. Development teams find themselves investing significant time addressing bugs, outages, and user complaints after the fact. Downtime can cost Fortune 1000 companies up to $1M per hour​. 

It’s clear: speed needs to be balanced with reliability, but what’s the catch?Current release practices don’t set developers up for success. 

Lagging indicators make it nearly impossible to detect issues early. Instead, teams often first hear of problems from frustrated customers. This reactive cycle can force engineers into frantic debugging, jumping between systems to identify and address issues. While feature flags and incremental rollouts can limit the impact, they often bury critical signals, making problems harder to catch. This broken process can keep teams in constant firefighting mode, ultimately at the expense of stability and user trust.

Guarded Releases: a game-changing solution

Guarded Releases provides a forward-thinking, proactive solution that enables teams to deliver high-velocity updates without sacrificing performance or user trust. By embedding automated monitoring, controls, and rollbacks into the deployment process, teams can prevent issues before they impact users, making each release a low-risk, high-confidence event.

Guarded Releases enable you to proactively detect and address issues before your customers even know something’s wrong. By providing visibility down to the flag level, we help ensure your critical metrics are always monitored. If anything starts to degrade, we automatically notify or roll back the change, reducing the burden on your team and keeping your application stable. This way, you can optimize your release strategies, knowing your metrics are covered. 

Catch bugs before your customers do

Establish Performance Thresholds to ensure every stage of rollout meets the performance, latency, and application availability you need. Fine-tune releases by setting up key metrics that help closely track changes and avoid any performance issues.

• Embed monitoring directly into every release: Ingest telemetry and monitoring data through integrations with Sentry, Segment, OpenTelemetry, and LaunchDarkly SDKs. Track key metrics like latency and error rates directly within LaunchDarkly, ensuring seamless setup with existing SDKs for releases and experimentation. This approach reduces noise, focusing only on critical metrics for real-time monitoring of high-risk workflows.
• Maximize monitoring efficiency: Set customizable duration monitoring, including out-of-the-box timeframes, to seamlessly schedule releases by date, time, and location.
• Minimize the blast radius: Use out-of-the-box progressive rollouts to release updates gradually, reaching only a percentage of users over 24 hours to limit impact. With Guarded Progressive Releases, updates roll out to defined user subsets in controlled phases, allowing teams to pause or roll back at any point for precise control and reduced risk.
• Control your deployment: Define exact audience exposure, ensuring features reach the right users at the right time for safe rollouts and early issue detection. Set custom thresholds—such as latency, error limits, and success metrics—to protect critical user flows like booking. Choose from regression-safe, out-of-the-box configurations or customize performance baselines to suit specific needs.

Proactively monitor and mitigate risk in every release 

Let LaunchDarkly handle the heavy lifting: with Application Auto-Remediation, we respond in milliseconds when performance thresholds are breached, reducing engineering toil and time to mitigation. Every release is automatically monitored to safeguard your application’s performance and keep customers happy, while any issues are contained with a minimized blast radius—so you can focus on building, not firefighting.

• Protect your releases: Proactively monitor performance metrics during the critical initial release window. As releases progress, teams receive real-time updates to quickly identify any issues. Comprehensive monitoring provides real-time insights into each deployment’s health and risk profile, enabling swift responses to maintain stability.
• Get instant, actionable alerts: Receive immediate notifications when key metrics exceed thresholds (e.g., error spikes), allowing teams to respond quickly and contain issues. Alerts specify the exact change causing the problem and can trigger one-click rollback directly from Slack, email, or PagerDuty, enabling fast, targeted action to maintain stability.
• Auto roll-back failed releases:Instantly protect stability and customer experience by reverting problematic changes globally with one-click, no redeployment needed. Automatic rollbacks can trigger based on thresholds, proactively managing issues without manual intervention and minimizing downtime.

Deliver better software with confidence

Maintain development speed without sacrificing quality by leveraging near real-time release insights to understand how changes impact the end-user experience. Gain full visibility into user journeys across web and mobile to identify frustrations and key issues. Release Monitoring provides end-to-end visibility into the risk and health of your releases, with real-time insights into regressions and resolution status.

• Understand the impact of each change with insights into user experience. Ship confidently at high velocity, validating every update before full release, and prioritize high-impact improvements to elevate customer satisfaction.
• Measure your releases: Correlate key metrics like errors and latency with user interactions to pinpoint issues from recent changes. Predict outcomes by analyzing user behavior to reduce churn and optimize experiences.
• Gain insights from rollouts: Observe how the introduced changes affect metrics over time with persistent tracking of rollout results between variations. 
• Plus, enhanced usability and visual insights: Our updated interface provides at-a-glance views with clearer metrics, streamlined rollbacks, and “hovercard” explanations for regressions, making it easy for teams to make data-driven decisions that balance speed with stability.

And, we’re not stopping at just proactively guarding your releases.

• Error Monitoring (Coming Soon): Track issues instantly with real-time alerts, stack traces, and user-path breadcrumbs to proactively diagnose and resolve problems. Error Monitoring links bugs to specific feature flags, identifies affected users, and correlates metrics with system errors for a streamlined troubleshooting process.
• Session Replay (Coming Soon):  Replay user actions and view exact user flows to pinpoint where issues occur, helping teams quickly resolve user-impacting problems and maintain a seamless experience. Session Replay captures the full user experience, showing engineers how issues unfolded with complete context, including active feature flags.

Together, these tools allow for fast root cause analysis and a full-picture view of issues without jumping between systems.

At the end of the day, it’s all about de-risking your software releases to ensure a seamless customer experience. LaunchDarkly’s Guarded Releases provide complete visibility into how changes impact end users, allowing teams to prioritize high-impact improvements, gain real-time insights, and predict customer outcomes. 

With Guarded Releases, teams can release faster, safer, and smarter by using automated safeguards, proactive monitoring, and real-time remediation. This powerful approach minimizes risk, balances speed with stability, and helps teams deliver with confidence, driving both productivity and customer satisfaction.

To learn more, read the docs or join us on January 15th, 2025 at 11:00am PT for a LaunchDarkly Tech Talk where we'll cover more about how Guarded Releases can help your team.