Overview

Datadog feature flags offer a powerful, integrated way to manage feature delivery, with built-in observability and seamless integration across the platform.

• Real-time metrics: Understand who’s receiving each variant, as well as how your flag impacts the health & performance of your application—all in real time.

• Supports any data type: Use Booleans, strings, numbers or full JSON objects—whatever your use case requires.

• Built for experimentation: Target specific audiences for A/B tests, roll out features gradually with canary releases, and automatically roll back when regressions are detected.

• OpenFeature compatible: Built on the OpenFeature standard, ensuring compatibility with existing OpenFeature implementations and providing a vendor-neutral approach to feature flag management.

Configure your environments

Your organization likely already has pre-configured environments for Development, Staging, and Production. If you need to configure these or any other environments, navigate to the Environments page to create tag queries for each environment. You can also identify which environment should be considered a Production environment.

Create your first feature flag

Step 1: Import and initialize the SDK

First, install @datadog/openfeature-browser and @openfeature/web-sdk as dependencies in your project:

yarn add @datadog/openfeature-browser@preview @openfeature/web-sdk

Then, add the following to your project to initialize the SDK:

import { DatadogProvider } from '@datadog/openfeature-browser';
import { OpenFeature } from '@openfeature/web-sdk';

// Initialize the provider
const provider = new DatadogProvider({
   clientToken: '<CLIENT_TOKEN>',
   applicationId: '<APPLICATION_ID>',
   enableExposureLogging: true,
   site: 'datadoghq.com',
   env: '<YOUR_ENV>', // Same environment normally passed to the RUM SDK
   service: '<SERVICE_NAME>',
   version: '1.0.0',
});

// Set the provider
await OpenFeature.setProviderAndWait(provider);

More information about OpenFeature SDK configuration options can be found in its documentation. For more information on creating client tokens and application IDs, see API and Application Keys.

Step 2: Create a feature flag

Use the feature flags creation UI to bootstrap your first feature flag. By default, the flag is disabled in all environments.

Step 3: Evaluate the flag and write feature code

In your application code, use the SDK to evaluate the flag and gate the new feature.

import { OpenFeature } from '@openfeature/web-sdk';

const client = OpenFeature.getClient();

// If applicable, set relevant attributes on the client's global context
// (e.g. org id, user email)
await OpenFeature.setContext({
   org: { id: 2 },
   user: { id: 'user-123', email: 'user@example.com' },
   targetingKey: 'user-123',
});

// This is what the SDK returns if the flag is disabled in
// the current environment
const fallback = false; 

const showFeature = await client.getBooleanValue('show-new-feature', fallback);
if (showFeature) {
   // Feature code here
}

After you’ve completed this step, redeploy the application to pick up these changes. Additional usage examples can be found in the SDK’s documentation.

Step 4: Define targeting rules and enable the feature flag

Now that the application is ready to check the value of your flag, you can start adding targeting rules. Targeting rules enable you to define where or to whom to serve different variants of your feature.

Go to Feature Flags, select your flag, then find the Targeting Rules & Rollouts section. Select the environment whose rules you want to modify, and click Edit Targeting Rules.

Step 5: Publish the rules in your environments

After saving changes to the targeting rules, publish those rules by enabling your flag in the environment of your choice.

In the Targeting Rules & Rollouts section, toggle your selected environment to Enabled.

The flag serves your targeting rules in this environment. You can continue to edit these targeting rules to control where the variants are served.

Step 6: Monitor your rollout

Monitor the feature rollout from the feature flag details page, which provides real-time exposure tracking and metrics such as error rate and page load time. As you incrementally release the feature with the flag, view the Real-Time Metric Overview panel in the Datadog UI to see how the feature impacts application performance.

Further reading

Más enlaces, artículos y documentación útiles:

OpenFeature Web SDK documentationEXTERNAL SITE