Flag statuses in Feature Experimentation

Flag statuses help you understand the lifecycle of each feature flag across environments. They show whether a flag is under development, being tested, actively serving production traffic, stale, paused, or archived. These statuses are auto-calculated using ruleset state, rule state, environment type, and time-based activity signals.

Flag statuses help teams manage feature flags more effectively and reduce the risk of forgotten or unused flags accumulating technical debt. Flag statuses provide a clear, consistent system for identifying which flags require attention.

This feature is currently in beta. Contact your Customer Success Manager or sign up for the beta on Optimizely.com.

Flags dashboard

Go to Flags.

The Flags dashboard gives you a view of what is happening to a flag and what rules are implemented for the flag in your Feature Experimentation project. To learn how to create a flag, see Manage flags.

A ruleset is the collection of rules associated with a flag. See New flag and rule lifecycle management FAQs for information.

Filter by flag status

1. Go to Flags and click Apply Filters.

   

2. Click + Add Filter.

3. Use the field drop-down list and select Status in the Flag section.

   

4. Use the operator down-down list and select is.
5. Select the statuses you want to filter by using the value drop-down list.

Flag history

Every flag has its own change history. To see a flag's history,

1. Go to Flags and click a flag.
2. Click History.

3. Use Type drop-down list and select Flag.

   

The flag's change history works similarly to the project's change history. Use the drop-down lists to filter by Type, Date, and Source.

For a specific change, click Show details to see a description of the update. To collapse the change details, click Hide details. Press Alt (Windows) or Option ⌥ (Mac) + click Show details or Hide details to show or collapse all change details.

See Flag history for information.

Flag statuses

A flag can take on one of the following statuses:

• Draft
• Testing
• Live
• Paused
• Stale
• Archived

Statuses are derived from ruleset and rule states, environment type, and time-based logic.

Draft

The flag is still in the configuration phase and does not serve traffic in any environment. Each newly created ruleset (which includes the flag's environment and rules) starts in Draft status. The following conditions determine this status:

• Ruleset environment – Production (Primary environment) and Non-production (Development).
• Ruleset status – Draft
• Rule status – Any or none.
• Last modified – Any

Testing

The flag is being actively tested in non-production environments only. You can review the results before promoting to production. The following conditions determine this status:

• Ruleset environment – Production (Primary environment) and Non-production (Development).
• Ruleset status – 
  • Production (Primary Environment) – Draft or Paused
  • Non-Production (Dev) – Running
• Rule status –
  • Production (Primary Environment) – Any status or no rules.
  • Non-Production (Dev) – At least one Running rule.
• Last modified – Any

Live

The flag is active in production and serving traffic. This includes flags with running experiments or recently concluded experiments still being observed. The following conditions determine this status:

• Ruleset environment – Production (Primary environment) and Non-production (Development).
• Ruleset status – At least one Running ruleset in production.
• Rule status – At least one Running rule in production.
• Last modified – Any

Paused

The flag has been deliberately paused and is not currently serving new traffic.

• Ruleset environment – Production (Primary environment) and Non-production (Development).
• Ruleset status – Paused
• Rule status – Any or none.
• Last modified – Any

Stale

The flag is no longer in active use and may be a candidate for cleanup. Flags that have not been modified for more than 30 days and are not delivering traffic enter this state. The following conditions determine this status

• Ruleset environment – Production (Primary environment) and Non-production (Development).
• Ruleset status – Any status other than Running.
• Rule status – Any or none.
• Last modified – Last modified more than 30 days ago.

Stale flags help teams identify features that may be ready for removal or archiving, reducing technical debt.

Archived

You can manually archive flags that are no longer needed. Archiving a flag also removes it from the datafile.