Datadog links feature flags with real-time observability

Datadog has launched Feature Flags, a new product that links feature management with the company's observability tools for cloud applications.

The release adds feature flag controls inside Datadog's platform and connects them with operational data from application monitoring and user experience monitoring. Datadog said the product is generally available and integrates across Datadog APM and RUM.

Feature flags are commonly used by software teams to turn functionality on and off without a full redeploy. They also support controlled rollouts, experimentation and staged releases across different user groups and environments. In many organisations, feature flagging tools sit outside the main monitoring stack. Engineers then need to piece together telemetry from multiple systems when a new release causes a rise in errors, a performance regression, or a change in user behaviour.

Siloed tooling

Datadog positions the product as a response to that separation between release controls and observability. When feature management and monitoring systems do not share context, teams can struggle to identify whether incidents relate to a new feature, a configuration change, or a separate service issue. That gap can also slow incident response during staged rollouts where only a portion of users see the change.

Engineering teams often rely on canary releases and blue and green deployments to reduce risk. These methods still require careful coordination, particularly across distributed systems where a feature touches multiple services. Manual steps and custom scripts remain common for rollbacks, traffic adjustments and post-release checks, especially when teams need to respond quickly under pressure.

Datadog said Feature Flags connects every flag with real-time observability data. The company said this association makes it possible to trace reliability issues back to a specific flag or configuration. It also said the product supports automated rollouts and rollbacks based on service health signals.

APM and RUM

Datadog APM focuses on application performance monitoring across services, traces and dependencies. Datadog RUM tracks real user experience in web and mobile applications. Feature Flags is designed to correlate flag states with these data sources, so teams can see how a particular flag state changes latency, error rates and user-side behaviour in a single view.

The company said the product can apply experimentation guardrails across environments. It also said teams can adjust system behaviour without redeploying code. That approach is often used for operational toggles and for controlling exposure during experiments, particularly when a feature needs fast rollback options.

Datadog also emphasised maintenance work around stale flags. Feature flags can accumulate over time as teams ship incremental releases. Removing unused flags is a recurring engineering task, as old code paths increase complexity and raise the risk of unexpected behaviour. Datadog said Feature Flags includes automation to identify unused flags and create pull requests for cleanup, with integrations that include Bits AI and MCP.

Release workflow

Datadog said Feature Flags complements its existing CI/CD visibility and test optimisation products. The company framed the product as a way of bringing more operational insight into release management, where teams decide how to expose new code and how to react when metrics shift.

The launch follows Datadog's acquisition of Eppo, which Datadog referenced as an influence on the new product's starting point. Eppo is known for experimentation and analytics tooling, a market where feature flagging frequently intersects with measurement and controlled exposure.

Yanbing Li, Chief Product Officer at Datadog, tied the release to the pace of software delivery and the need to manage risk during frequent changes.

"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."

Datadog's core business centres on observability and security for cloud applications through a SaaS platform. The company sells tools for infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, user experience monitoring and cloud security. Many of its customers use the platform across development, operations and security teams as systems scale and architectures become more distributed.

Feature Flags is generally available now, with native integration across Datadog APM and RUM.