We’re a monolith on ECS/Heroku. Is this overkill?

No. Start with release markers (Grafana/Honeycomb/Sentry), a one-page Release Health dashboard, and a 10% then 100% blue/green. You can add canary steps later. The 60-second feedback loop matters more than the platform.

What if we don’t have Prometheus?

Use whatever collects metrics today—Datadog, New Relic, CloudWatch Metrics. The pattern is the same: annotate, check a small set of leading indicators, and gate promotions based on those checks.

How do we keep feature flags from becoming tech debt?

Expire them. Add an owner and TTL to each flag. Alert on flags older than 30 days. In LaunchDarkly, use tags and the API to report flags that can be removed once a release is fully rolled out.

How do we get buy-in from product and ops?

Show them the before/after of CFR, lead time, and MTTR on a single slide after two sprints. Tie green releases to faster feature delivery and lower incident load. Nobody argues with a 50% MTTR reduction.

Release-engineering · Oct 12, 2025 · 10 minute read

The 60‑Second Release Feedback Loop: Stop Guessing After You Click Deploy

If your team waits more than a minute to know if a release is safe, you’re flying blind. Here’s the deployment monitoring scaffolding that actually works at scale—without boiling the ocean.

Alex Mercer

Principal Release Engineer, GitPlumbers

20 years in the trenches across fintech, retail, and SaaS. Ex-Netflix tooling, ex-Shopify platform. I fix brittle release pipelines and the org charts that break them.

If you can’t answer “is the release OK?” in 60 seconds, you don’t have release monitoring—you have charts.

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The 60‑Second Release Feedback Loop: Stop Guessing After You Click Deploy

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist