New product connects every feature flag to observability data, enabling automated rollouts, faster troubleshooting and safer experimentation
Datadog, Inc. (NASDAQ: DDOG), the AI-powered observability and security platform for cloud applications, today launched Feature Flags, which unifies feature management with observability to help engineering teams release new functionality fast without compromising reliability. The product is now generally available and integrates natively across Datadog APM and RUM.
Modern feature management is often siloed from observability, forcing development teams to manually stitch together telemetry to understand how feature changes impact performance and reliability. These blind spots can create risky deployments, delayed incident response, and growing technical debt as stale flags accumulate across environments. Teams also frequently struggle to coordinate rollouts and rollbacks across distributed systems, relying on custom scripts and manual oversight to mitigate risk.
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As a result, releasing new functionality becomes a stressful, high-stakes, and manual effort. Engineers monitor dashboards, ramp traffic slowly with canaries or blue/green deployments, and scramble to identify whether spikes in errors or latency relate to a specific feature, configuration change, or unrelated service behavior. This means it can take weeks or months to launch a feature, or increases the risk of pushing untested features.
Datadog Feature Flags addresses these challenges by natively connecting every feature flag to real-time observability data. With this integration, teams can immediately trace reliability issues to the exact feature or configuration responsible, automate rollouts and rollbacks, enforce experimentation guardrails, and clean up stale flags before they accumulate into technical debt. Feature Flags complements Datadog’s CI/CD visibility and test optimization products by extending observability left into release management itself.
“Releasing new features is one of the riskiest parts of modern software delivery, and releasing frequently is even more important in today’s AI-driven development age,” said Yanbing Li, Chief Product Officer at Datadog. “Datadog Feature Flags, created with a head start after our acquisition of Eppo, allows development teams to automatically detect regressions, enforce reliability guardrails, and ship updates faster and more safely by tying every flag to real-time telemetry.”
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Datadog Feature Flags helps organizations deliver new functionality safely and reliably by providing:
- Unified Observability + Feature Management: Correlate every feature flag with Datadog telemetry (APM and RUM) to see exactly how a feature affects performance and reliability in one view.
- Automated, Data-Driven Rollouts and Rollbacks: Mitigate risk with canary releases, circuit breakers, and instant rollbacks triggered by real-time service health signals, without manual intervention or custom scripts.
- Dynamic Configuration and Safe Experimentation at Scale: Adjust system behavior instantly without redeploying code. Enforce guardrails across environments and prevent reliability regressions during experiments.
- Automated Stale-Flag Cleanup: Reduce technical debt with Bits AI and MCP integrations that identify unused flags and generate pull requests to safely remove dead paths from codebases.
Feature Flags are now generally available. For more information, visit: https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/feature-flags/