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Issue created by Mark Pundsack@markpundsackContributor

Feature monitoring

Description

There are at least three kinds of monitoring that a developer cares about:

  1. Application performance monitoring (APM)
  2. System monitoring
  3. Business metrics/analytics

What I'm excited about is a 4th kind, which I'm calling "feature monitoring". Being able to know after shipping a merge request that we didn't blow up production. Or that error rates grew by 5% after enabling a feature flag on a subset of users.

Proposal

Here are three potential evolutions:

  1. Measure before/after deploying merge request and attribute any changes to the relevant merge request(s)
  2. Canary deploys where new features (via merge requests) can be shipped to a portion of a production fleet so they get real traffic, then monitor, report, and alert on differences in performance.
  3. Feature flags to ship one or more merge requests behind a flag that can be enabled for a portion of production users, then monitor, report, and alert on differences in performance.

Links / references