New in Flagsmith: 2024 Feature Roundup

We've had an exciting first half of the year!

We’ve been working hard to improve Flagsmith and to continue driving the product towards helping organisations improve their release workflows. We've also made specific improvements around security to help our enterprise customers better manage their large teams.

What's Coming

Recently, we’ve been making some important decisions about the direction of the product and what the key problems are for our customers. Over the next few quarters, we’ll continue releasing features that are designed to help our customers with their release processes as well as improving the observability of their feature flags in other parts of the business. 

Over the course of H1, we’ve been laying a lot of the groundwork for this as well as delivering some smaller features that help us head in this direction, such as new integrations with GitHub and Grafana. 

In the market, we are seeing a demand for more seamless integrations with observability platforms as well as a need for higher level management of ‘releases’ instead of operating on individual features. These are the themes that we’re going to be working towards over the course of the rest of the year. 

‍

‍

TL;DR Cool Things We’ve Released So Far This Year

• New product integrations
  • Grafana
  • Github
• Improvement to our local evaluation engine which includes identity overrides in the evaluation
• Custom Fields
• Roles

Integrations That Actually Make a Difference to You

GitHub

With our GitHub integration, you can improve visibility and maintenance of your feature flags by linking them to issues and pull requests. Changes to the feature flags will trigger updates to your GitHub resources, allowing you to quickly see the state of any related features in all of your environments without having to navigate away from GitHub. 

Conversely, you’ll be able to see any related issues and PRs when looking at a feature flag in the Flagsmith dashboard, helping to avoid those frustrating moments when you can’t remember why a feature flag was created!

Grafana

With our Grafana integration, changes to your flags in Flagsmith will send events to Grafana as annotations, allowing you to see any changes to flags that might have affected any of your metrics. 

Enterprise Upgrades

Roles

We updated our permissions system to give you better control and granularity by creating Roles that can be assigned to users, groups, and API keys. This allows for better implementations of DRY principals in your authentication and permission management for teams using Flagsmith. 

Custom Fields

With Custom Fields, you can define optional and mandatory fields that can be set on your Feature, Environment, and Segment entities in Flagsmith. By setting up mandatory fields, you can ensure that Flagsmith entities created by your teams include the information you need to be able to quickly identify their purpose, status, or whatever you decide is necessary! 

Performance Improvements

Identity Overrides in Local Evaluation

By using local evaluation mode in our server-side SDKs, you can evaluate your flags in just a few milliseconds. With this improvement, you can now use local evaluation mode even if you rely on identity overrides for some or all of your feature flags. 

Quality of Life Improvements

We're really only here to make your life easier. So we've made a number of QOL updates in the Flagsmith app to hopefully do just that. Here's a quick overview:

New navigation

We've optimised the nav for day-to-day tasks, making it more clear which tasks are environment-related and which aren't.

Filter flags by state / value

We've introduced a slimmed-down filter that pre-selects features based on their most recent version, simplifying the filter results.

Outdated flags

We’ve added a warning to flags that were created more than 30 days ago and aren’t marked as permanent, helping you keep your flags healthy. 

Manage permissions from a single location

Organisation, project, and environment settings can now be managed in a single place for users, groups, and roles. Please note, this is only available as part of our Enterprise plan.

Appreciate the great feedback we've had on these updates already!

What’s Coming Next

We’re excited for what the next months will bring. Here’s a look ahead at what’s coming.

Feature Versioning

You’ll be able to see a linear history for each feature and roll back to a previous state with a single click. 

Stale Flags

You’ll be able to quickly see if any of your features haven’t been modified in a given period in any of your environments. 

Transient Traits and Identities

From the SDKs, you’ll be able to mark certain traits—or the whole identity—as ‘transient’, meaning that it won’t be persisted. This will be very useful when using Flagsmith across multiple platforms, or in multi-tenancy platforms, for example, as you’ll be able to evaluate flags in a given context without affecting any other contexts. 

Change Requests for Segments

We’re replicating our current change request functionality that exists for features and applying it to segments to improve the governance when modifying segments. 

Improved Identity Search Capabilities

We’re improving the search capabilities of our identities in the dashboard, and via the API. 

Improved Release Management

This is under design at the moment, but we’re looking to add functionality to allow greater control over releasing multiple features at once. 

Better Observability Integrations

We’re investigating the functionality for each of our most popular integrations, specifically around observability, and looking at improving their functionality to give you better visibility and automation.  

Check out our product roadmap for more details!

About the Author

Matthew helped start Flagsmith and is the CTO. He brings a background in project management to his software engineering work.