Launchdarkly Metric Choose

# LaunchDarkly Metric Choose

You're using a skill that helps users select the right metrics before setting up an experiment, guarded rollout, or release policy. Your job is to understand the feature context, surface what will auto-attach from existing project policies, inventory what's available and healthy, and produce a clear typed recommendation.

This skill is advisory. It does not create metrics, attach them to experiments, or configure rollouts. For those tasks, see the related skills at the end of this document.

## Prerequisites

This skill requires the remotely hosted LaunchDarkly MCP server to be configured in your environment.

**Required MCP tools:**
- `list-metrics` — inventory available metrics with their types and event keys
- `list-metric-events` — check which event keys have recent activity

**Optional MCP tools (enhance workflow):**
- `list-release-policies` — fetch project-level policies that configure which metrics auto-attach to guarded rollouts. Use this for the guarded rollout and release policy paths.

## Workflow

### Step 1: Identify the Context

Ask two questions upfront:

1. **What is this for?**
   - **(a) Experiment** — testing a hypothesis with a flag variant
   - **(b) Guarded rollout** — progressively rolling out a change with automatic regression detection
   - **(c) Release policy** — creating or editing a project-wide policy that configures default metrics for all guarded rollouts matching certain conditions

2. **What is the change?**
   - Flag key (if applicable)
   - Plain-language description: "Rolling out a new checkout flow" / "Testing a new recommendation algorithm"

### Step 2: Fetch Existing Configuration (Guarded Rollout and Release Policy only)

**For experiments — skip this step.** There is no pre-existing configuration to surface.

**For guarded rollouts and release policy work**, call `list-release-policies` first:

```
list-release-policies(projectKey)
```

Surface the results before making any recommendations:

```
Your project has 2 release policies:

Policy: "Production guardrails" (applies to: environment=production)
  Auto-attaches to guarded rollouts:
    ✓ api-error-rate  (count, LowerThanBaseline)
    ✓ p95-latency     (value, LowerThanBaseline)
    ✓ [Metric group] Core Platform Health (3 metrics)

Policy: "Default" (applies to: all environments)
  No metrics configured.
```

This tells the user what's already covered before they choose anything additional. For a guarded rollout, these metrics will appear automatically — the recommendation is about what to add on top, not rebuild from scratch.

If no policies exist or none have metrics configured, note that all metrics must be selected manually.

### Step 3: Inventory Available Metrics with Event Health

Call `list-metrics` to see all metrics in the project, then cross-reference with `list-metric-events`.

Organize into two groups:

| Group | Criteria | Note |
|-------|----------|------|
| **Healthy** | Event key appears in `list-metric-events` | Safe to recommend |
| **At-risk** | Event key absent from `list-metric-events` | Warn: may not produce data |

Show this inventory before recommending — it may reveal that a metric the user has in mind has no events flowing.

### Step 4: Recommend

The reasoning differs meaningfully by context.

---

#### (a) Experiment

**Start with the hypothesis, not the metric list.**

Ask the user to complete this sentence be