Feature Flags user metrics

Problem to solve

Visibility into how many times a feature toggle evaluated to enabled in a given time period.

Intended users

Developers/Release managers that want to monitor the feature toggles for analytics purposes Developers that want to keep track of undefined feature flags

Further details

Included in the unleash library

When you enable a feature for a small group of users it is nice to know how many users actually get exposed to it. This is why we added metrics to Unleash 2.0. The SDK will locally collect metrics in the background and regularly share this information with the Unleash API. The API then aggregates the metrics from all clients and calculates how many times a feature toggle evaluated to enabled in a given time period.

When implementing the metrics feature we discovered that this was a nice way to display which toggles are actually in use in an application. It even made it possible to show feature toggles being used in the client code which is not defined in the Unleash API. Showing undefined toggles used in client applications makes it easier to discover feature toggles not defined in Unleash UI. This can happen when a developer starts using a new feature toggle but has not defined it in Unleash UI yet. The undefined feature toggle is also a clickable link to make it easy to define it in Unleash.

Proposal

Use the unleash

API to collect metrics and present to the user

POST: http://unleash.host.com/api/client/metrics

{ "appName": "appName", "instanceId": "instanceId", "bucket": { "start": "2016-11-03T07:16:43.572Z", "stop": "2016-11-03T07:16:53.572Z", "toggles": { "toggle-name-1": { "yes": 123, "no": 321 }, "toggle-name-2": { "yes": 111, "no": 0 } } } }

This requires UX, but the general idea would be to allow the user to insert a date range and select a feature flag and the metrics would be presented to him/her.

For the MVC we can set a default time range - last 30 days and not have this configurable.

Permissions and Security

Documentation

Testing

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

What is the type of buyer?

Links / references

https://schibsted.com/blog/unleash-features-gradually/

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