Flag impressions and activity status

Flag impressions in the CloudBees platform enable you to visualize and analyze your feature flag configuration data. Every time a flag is evaluated, that evaluation is counted as an impression. There are five types of flag activity which make up the flag lifecycle. The flag lifecycle, defined based on impression data, is as follows:

Table 1. Feature flag activity statuses
Lifecycle term	Definition
Setup	No impressions yet received.
Active	Has received impressions with different values over the last seven days.
Stale	Has received impressions over the last seven days, but all with the same value.
Inactive	No impressions received within the past seven days.
Permanent	Long-lived flag that ignores impression data. Is user-defined.

Mark a flag as permanent

In Flag settings, you can mark any flag as Permanent. By changing a flag activity status to permanent, long-lived flags for features such as timeout and URLs ignore impression data.

The flag configuration must be enabled to calculate any impressions.
Impression data is fetched and reported every few minutes.

Access impression data

Display flag impressions once you have enabled a configured flag. The number of evaluations is presented for each value variation as a stacked bar chart by time frame.

To access the flag impressions:

Select Feature management from the left pane.
Select an Environment from the options.
Select an Impressions number for a flag to display the impressions chart.

Figure 1. An example flag list with an impression link highlighted.

As in the example below, the impressions chart displays the flag values for the selected time frame.

Figure 2. An example flag impression chart.

The chart includes the following for the selected time frame:
1. The option to sort the data by any of the following time frames:
  - Last 24 hours
  - Last 7 days
  - Last 30 days
2. The total number of flag impressions in the selected time frame.
3. The number and percentages of impressions for each flag value in the selected time frame.
4. A stacked bar chart of the number of impressions for the indicated time period, where each value is displayed as a different color, according to the legend.
5. You can hover over a stacked bar to display the number of impressions for each value for that time period.

The flag impressions are displayed accordingly.