Deployments & Version Tracking

Track deployments and compare performance across application versions.

Overview

Every time you deploy a new version of your Meteor app, SkySignal tracks the change and correlates it with your performance data. This makes it straightforward to answer the question every developer asks after a deploy: "did that make things better or worse?"

How Version Detection Works

The SkySignal agent automatically detects version changes through the appVersion setting in your Meteor settings file:

{
  "public": {
    "skysignal": {
      "publicKey": "pk_live_xxx",
      "appVersion": "1.4.2"
    }
  }
}

When the agent reports a new appVersion value, SkySignal records a deployment event with the timestamp. No manual tagging or API calls required -- just update the version in your settings and deploy.

Versions Tab

The Versions tab in the site detail view shows your deployment history:

• List of all detected versions with deploy timestamps
• Duration each version was active
• Key metrics for each version (response time, error rate, throughput)

This gives you a quick timeline of your release history and how each version performed.

Version Comparison

Select any two versions to compare them side-by-side. The comparison shows:

Metric	Description
Response Time	Average and P95 method response times
Error Rate	Percentage of requests resulting in errors
Throughput	Requests per minute

The comparison highlights regressions and improvements, making it easy to spot if a deploy introduced a performance issue or successfully fixed one.

Using Version Comparison

1. Navigate to a site's Versions tab
2. Select two versions from the list
3. Click Compare
4. Review the metrics diff

This is especially useful for validating performance fixes. Deploy your optimization, wait for some data to accumulate, then compare the before and after versions with real production numbers.

Deploy Markers on Charts

Deploy markers show up as vertical lines on performance charts throughout SkySignal. When you see a spike in response time or error rate, a deploy marker right before it tells you exactly what changed.

Deploy markers appear on:

• Method response time charts
• Error rate charts
• Throughput charts
• System metrics charts

Hover over a deploy marker to see the version number and deploy timestamp.

Best Practices

Use Semantic Versioning

Follow semver (major.minor.patch) for your appVersion so it's easy to tell at a glance whether a deploy was a major release or a patch fix.

Deploy Small Changes

Smaller, more frequent deploys make it easier to pinpoint which change caused a regression. If you deploy 50 commits at once and performance tanks, you have a lot of code to sift through. One or two commits per deploy keeps the blast radius small.

Check Metrics After Every Deploy

Make it a habit to check the Versions tab after deploying. Even if alerts don't fire, a gradual degradation in response time or a small uptick in error rate is worth catching early.

Next Steps

• Errors View - Investigate errors introduced by deployments
• Alerts - Get notified when deploys cause issues
• SLOs View - Track whether deployments impact your reliability targets