Argo CD v3.2 is officially GA, bringing a rich set of improvements across ApplicationSets, Progressive Sync, Hydrator, UI/UX, and overall reliability.
The official RC blog post by Nitish Kumar provides an excellent overview of several key enhancements — if you haven’t read it yet, it’s a great foundation.
This post provides an in-depth overview of the Argo CD v3.2 GA release. Each section includes a link to the relevant merged GitHub PR so you can dive deeper into the implementation.
This short video adds additional context by reflecting on the overall impact of the 3.2 release, the problems it improves compared to earlier versions, which features are likely to resonate most with the community, and notable contributions that helped shape the release.
UI/UX enhancements
Hydration status now shown on app tiles
A much-requested improvement is now live: the Applications page shows hydration status directly on each application tile. You no longer need to open the app details view to check whether hydration is in progress, succeeded, or failed. This change makes it far easier to understand the state of source-hydrated apps at a glance and significantly improves the overall user experience.
Sortable columns in the application list
The Applications table now supports sorting across all major columns — including name, sync status, health, namespace, and more. While it may look like a small UI tweak, it’s a huge usability boost for teams managing hundreds of applications.
Improved repository connection state messages
Previously, the connectionState icon only showed its status message as a hover tooltip. This update adds a dedicated connection state message row in the repository details view — similar to the one already available for clusters. Now, when a repository fails to connect, users can see the full error message clearly in the details panel, making troubleshooting much easier and far more intuitive.
Controller, performance & reliability improvements
Argo CD v3.2 includes several important enhancements that strengthen observability and improve how Argo CD monitors external systems and Kubernetes resources. These upgrades are especially valuable for organizations running GitOps at scale, where rate limits, network gateways, and ingress controllers directly influence reliability.
Below is a deeper look at these features, along with their corresponding PRs.
ApplicationSet: concurrency & queueing
ApplicationSet controller now handles significantly higher workloads with reduced contention.
Key benefits:
- Faster reconciliation for large deployments
- Reduced generator bottlenecks
- More predictable sync intervals
ApplicationSet: better error surfacing
Argo CD v3.2 introduces improved visibility into how ApplicationSet tracks and reports status changes. Previously, ApplicationSet could update status silently, making it difficult to understand what changed and why.
With this change, whenever ApplicationSet regenerates applications, you now get clear and targeted debug messages about:
- Status transitions - E.g.
Pending → Generating → Successful → Failed - Step transitions - Useful when multi-step generation occurs
- Message updates - Error descriptions, skipped reasons, invalid template warnings
ApplicationSet profiling support (pprof endpoints)
Platform teams can now profile ApplicationSet performance in production using pprof.
This is extremely valuable for:
- Debugging CPU spike
- Analyzing reconciliation timing
- Optimizing large-scale GitOps pipelines
Health check additions
DatadogMetric health assessment
ArgoCD needs to understand that a DatadogMetric object should be considered in “degraded” state when the conditions met in the script are true (Valid = False or Error = True). Therefore a built-in health assessment for DatadogMetric resources was added:
- Detects invalid metric queries
- Identifies missing providers
- Evaluates readiness
Great for teams using Datadog-driven autoscaling. The upgrade to 3.2 document covers all the health checks in 3.2.
Server-side diff (SSD) enhancements
Argo CD v3.2 now supports server-side diffing, using the Kubernetes API server to compute differences more accurately — especially for mutated or webhook-modified resources.
Command example
argocd app diff my-app --server-side-diff
For a deeper dive into how Argo CD computes diffs, watch the ArgoCon session “What the Diff?”.
Hydrator upgrades
It is now possible to customize the Hydrator commit message:
Custom commit messages
spec:
source:
hydrator:
commitMessage: "Hydrated {{ .AppName }} at {{ .Timestamp }}"Hydrator: automatic .gitattributes injection for clean diffs
Argo CD v3.2 introduces another valuable enhancement to Hydrator: automatic generation of a .gitattributes file at the root of the hydrated repository.
This file helps Git understand how to diff certain file types, ensuring more stable and predictable commit histories when Hydrator rewrites or regenerates content. This is particularly beneficial when hydration pipelines produce large YAML manifests.
Argo CD v3.2 is a meaningful release for developers, SREs, and platform teams — bringing improved safety, performance, GitOps automation, and orchestration capabilities. View the full GA release notes on github.
Happy Deployments!
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