Everybody is talking about DevOps these days — and trying to get you to do more (in less time). DevOps solutions ecosystems already have lots of monitoring, logging, ticketing, and collaboration tools; and the number of additional tools supporting DevOps increases every day. These new tools are also becoming increasingly integrated with each other. Like pieces of a puzzle, their complementary functions connect together and complete each other. Using these tools collaboratively can help you ship and maintain your applications faster.

But which ones to choose? You research them as they come on the market. You read about them to see if you can use them. But reading is not enough to help you decide.

Trying new tools without the time and trouble…

You need to use tools together to see how they will work, but the time and trouble of setting them up to work with your existing toolset and systems can be substantial. Even to try a simple combination like OpsGenie — JIRA — HipChat, you need to sign up for accounts, learn how to set up the new tool, and then configure both the tools and the environments to work together. Even if it doesn’t take that long to set up one tool, how many are you going to try?

OpsGenie saves you that time and trouble. Our DevOps Playground lets you try various combinations of tools using real-life scenarios — without the need to setup or configure anything! Tools like JIRA, HipChat, StatusPage, and Nagios are already integrated within our DevOps Playground environment. Dynatrace, Datadog, Zendesk, and Slack are being rolled out as I write this post — with more coming soon! You can try them all.

Seeing how tools function as part of an incident response orchestration system

Incident management is a crucial part of everyone’s DevOps practices. Incidents happen. You need to be ready for them, so you need to see how tools work in the context of incidents.

Luckily, OpsGenie orchestrates your incident response efforts, and our Playground can show you how we do it. The Playground integrates your tools with each other — and with OpsGenie — to create a powerful incident response management workflow. The Playground also provides complex problem patterns that simulate how OpsGenie and the integrated tools perform in realistic incident scenarios. Although you can try out and experiment with tools as standalone solutions, the Playground provides a more realistic demonstration in a preconfigured environment. Going forward, the Playground will demonstrate our experiences with an even greater variety of DevOps practices and patterns.

How it works

To give you a clear idea of how we integrate all these different tools, here is a high-level architectural view of our setup in the DevOps Playground.