LaunchDarkly Acquires Highlight to Make Guarded Software Releases the New Standard, as UK Industries Grapple With Mounting Tech Outages

LaunchDarkly, the comprehensive feature management platform that lets software and AI development teams ship faster while de-risking their releases, today announces the acquisition of Highlight, a powerful, open source, full-stack application monitoring platform known for its error monitoring, logging, distributed tracing and session replay capabilities. As engineering teams demand more control over risk and reliability, LaunchDarkly is doubling down on observability to make Guarded Releases, which automate monitoring, controls, and rollbacks into the release process to reduce risk, the new industry standard.     

Data shows that nine of the top banks and building societies operating in the UK accumulated at least 803 hours, the equivalent of more than 33 days, of unplanned tech and systems outages in the last two years. In some of the most recent incidents, affected banks have even resorted to compensating customers. As a result, software reliability is under the spotlight like never before, and there is a pressing need to improve the resilience of digital services.     

Against this backdrop, the acquisition of Highlight will support other businesses and industries in avoiding the same fate, tackling the root of these issues. Engineers will have greater ability to reduce the risks associated with software releases, monitor and resolve issues before they cause significant problems.  

“Guarded Releases represent the next evolution in software development, ensuring that new features are delivered safely and effectively”, said Dan Rogers, CEO of LaunchDarkly. “By integrating Highlight’s robust observability tools, we can equip teams with real-time insights to deploy features confidently, reducing risk while accelerating innovation.”  

Guarded Releases, introduced by LaunchDarkly, enable development teams to deploy incrementally, monitor impact in real time, and reduce risk while gaining valuable performance insights. With the addition of Highlight, LaunchDarkly deepens this capability, offering:    

• Error monitoring – Real-time detection, tracking and alerting on application errors, enabling engineering to pinpoint issues instantly, reducing downtime and improving system stability before customers even notice a problem.  

• Logging – High-speed scalable log analysis designed for comprehensive observability.   

• Traces – End-to-end performance insights across distributed systems, providing visibility into dependencies, latencies and bottlenecks

• Session replay – high-fidelity, pixel-perfect video replays of user interactions allowing developers to diagnose issues with full visual and contextual data.    

This matters now more than ever. For developers, real-time monitoring, error tracking, and pixel-perfect session replays provide instant visibility into issues, often before they impact end users. For businesses, features like Guarded Releases offer the confidence to deploy new functionality without the risk of the widespread disruptions recently seen across critical UK industries. And for customers, this translates to fewer crashes, more seamless digital experiences, and reduced service downtime.  

Highlight’s team, including co-founders Jay Khatri and Vadim Korolik, will join LaunchDarkly as part of the acquisition. Their expertise in observability and scalable infrastructure will accelerate innovation within the LaunchDarkly platform.