How Actions work in OpsLevel

OpsLevel helps you strike the balance between maintaining high security and reliability standards while unblocking developers who want to build and ship fast—with less bureaucracy for everyone. With Actions, you can do just that to standardize and streamline certain common tasks at the click of a button. This guide walks you through how Actions work in OpsLevel and what kinds of automations you can create.

If you’re looking for a step-by-step walkthrough of how to set up Actions in OpsLevel, check out our technical documentation.

How do Actions work?

Actions help you automate routine production tasks directly from OpsLevel. They integrate with most APIs to send customized webhooks whenever triggered, pulling metadata directly from an OpsLevel service or with some context from the developer. You can tie them to specific services (like rolling back a recent deploy) or keep them more general (like requesting temporary access).

Admins set up Actions for developers, controlling which service(s) they apply to and who can trigger them. Developers can then use Actions with a single click, or after entering a few brief details. Once complete, they’re notified with a custom message about whether the action taken was successful or not. You can trigger an Action from a service page, or in the self-service hub. 

Types of Actions can you create

There are two main categories of Actions you can create:

1. Actions that integrate with your CI/CD pipelines (e.g., freeze a deploy or create a new environment)
2. Actions that facilitate communication (e.g., post to Slack, trigger a PagerDuty incident)

From these categories, there are tons of possibilities, meaning you can do things like:

• Provision or resize infrastructure
• Request time-limited escalated tokens/permissions
• Provision a new Kafka topic
• Send a structured Slack message
• Trigger an incident in a tool like PagerDuty or Opsgenie
• Open a pull request
• File a new issue or ticket in JIRA
• Lock or unlock deploy pipelines
• Rollback the last deploy
• Kick off a CI pipeline

When you’re ready to get started, you can browse OpsLevel’s templated Actions that help you set up certain workflows in mere minutes, or you can create your own from scratch. If you’re just getting started (and your team uses Slack), try setting up the “Send a Slack message” template to try it out.

OpsLevel's self-service features help organizations ship better features, faster by removing everyday bottlenecks. By leveraging Actions, you can streamline basic production workflows while maintaining control over standards and management. Whether you choose to use predefined templates or create your own, it only takes a few clicks to get started.

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