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LaunchDarkly Introduces New Release Observability

LaunchDarkly announced multiple platform innovations to help engineering and product teams deliver with both high velocity and lower risk. 

The latest capabilities at LaunchDarkly give teams the tools they need to innovate boldly—without exposing customers or businesses to unnecessary risk. By bringing observability, AI controls, and analytics directly into the release process, LaunchDarkly is enabling engineering and product teams to ship with confidence, respond to application issues, and continuously improve the user experience.

“Software used to evolve quarterly. Today, it changes by the hour. And with AI systems adapting in production, often unpredictably, release management at feature level granularity has become mission-critical,” said Dan Rogers, CEO of LaunchDarkly. “Teams need the ability to ship with precision, respond in real time, and continuously optimize what’s live. That’s what LaunchDarkly delivers: a safer, smarter way to build and release software in an AI-powered world.”

Platform Updates Introduced at Galaxy ’25:

Guarded Releases – Observability at the Point of Release: Guarded Releases pair progressive rollouts with real-time monitoring, automated rollback, and feature-level observability. Teams can now identify regressions instantly and correlate them directly to specific changes, preventing incidents before they impact users. With the recent integration of Highlight.io, LaunchDarkly extends observability to include telemetry data like metrics, logs and traces at the point of release.

AI Configs – Runtime Control Plane for Model and Prompt Management: AI Configs give teams a centralized control plane to manage prompt and model configurations for AI-powered applications. Teams can safely iterate in production, monitor key metrics like cost and latency, and deploy fallback strategies when things go wrong without any code changes. This reduces risk while accelerating the development of AI features.

Warehouse-Native Experimentation & Product Analytics: LaunchDarkly now gives teams real-time insights into user behavior and feature engagement, powered directly by their data warehouse. With warehouse-native experimentation and product analytics, teams can quickly understand what’s working, what’s not, and how every feature impacts business outcomes. The recent integration of Houseware strengthens these capabilities by making it easier to run experiments, analyze results, and iterate faster, all within the existing data ecosystem.

“Generative AI is fundamentally changing the relationship between the code we build, the code we deploy, and the code we maintain in production. Experimentation, understanding user behaviour, is now a necessity, not a luxury,” said James Governor, RedMonk co-founder. “LaunchDarkly is building observability into its core offerings, deepening its focus on analytics, and doubling down on release management to create an integrated platform for progressive delivery in the AI era.”

Guarded Releases, AI Configs, and Warehouse-Native Experimentation & Product Analytics are generally available today. Advanced observability features within Guarded Releases, including error monitoring, session replay, and telemetry integrations, are available in early access.

The Latest

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

LaunchDarkly Introduces New Release Observability

LaunchDarkly announced multiple platform innovations to help engineering and product teams deliver with both high velocity and lower risk. 

The latest capabilities at LaunchDarkly give teams the tools they need to innovate boldly—without exposing customers or businesses to unnecessary risk. By bringing observability, AI controls, and analytics directly into the release process, LaunchDarkly is enabling engineering and product teams to ship with confidence, respond to application issues, and continuously improve the user experience.

“Software used to evolve quarterly. Today, it changes by the hour. And with AI systems adapting in production, often unpredictably, release management at feature level granularity has become mission-critical,” said Dan Rogers, CEO of LaunchDarkly. “Teams need the ability to ship with precision, respond in real time, and continuously optimize what’s live. That’s what LaunchDarkly delivers: a safer, smarter way to build and release software in an AI-powered world.”

Platform Updates Introduced at Galaxy ’25:

Guarded Releases – Observability at the Point of Release: Guarded Releases pair progressive rollouts with real-time monitoring, automated rollback, and feature-level observability. Teams can now identify regressions instantly and correlate them directly to specific changes, preventing incidents before they impact users. With the recent integration of Highlight.io, LaunchDarkly extends observability to include telemetry data like metrics, logs and traces at the point of release.

AI Configs – Runtime Control Plane for Model and Prompt Management: AI Configs give teams a centralized control plane to manage prompt and model configurations for AI-powered applications. Teams can safely iterate in production, monitor key metrics like cost and latency, and deploy fallback strategies when things go wrong without any code changes. This reduces risk while accelerating the development of AI features.

Warehouse-Native Experimentation & Product Analytics: LaunchDarkly now gives teams real-time insights into user behavior and feature engagement, powered directly by their data warehouse. With warehouse-native experimentation and product analytics, teams can quickly understand what’s working, what’s not, and how every feature impacts business outcomes. The recent integration of Houseware strengthens these capabilities by making it easier to run experiments, analyze results, and iterate faster, all within the existing data ecosystem.

“Generative AI is fundamentally changing the relationship between the code we build, the code we deploy, and the code we maintain in production. Experimentation, understanding user behaviour, is now a necessity, not a luxury,” said James Governor, RedMonk co-founder. “LaunchDarkly is building observability into its core offerings, deepening its focus on analytics, and doubling down on release management to create an integrated platform for progressive delivery in the AI era.”

Guarded Releases, AI Configs, and Warehouse-Native Experimentation & Product Analytics are generally available today. Advanced observability features within Guarded Releases, including error monitoring, session replay, and telemetry integrations, are available in early access.

The Latest

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...