From dashboard fatigue to operational excellence: Why XOps needs F5 Insight for ADSP

John MaddisonChief Marketing Officer | F5

Hybrid, multicloud, and multi-site application estates have made a once simple question surprisingly hard to answer: Are our applications healthy?

Holistic platforms like the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) unify and streamline how we deliver and secure every app and API; Cross-functional operations (XOps) is how teams run that platform at enterprise scale. And it all starts with unified observability.

Now generally available, F5 Insight for ADSP lays the visibility foundation for XOps—turning fragmented signals across applications and infrastructure into actionable intelligence, complete operational narratives, and ultimately, streamlined, scalable processes for optimization, troubleshooting, and remediation.

Redefining “business as usual” for operations teams

The new normal for 94% of organizations is hybrid multicloud application deployments that span data centers, multiple clouds, and the edge. Whether to ensure availability, optimize resourcing, cut costs, align workloads to infrastructure, or meet compliance mandates, leaders choose hybrid mlticloud deployments based on business drivers, not because operational complexity is fun.

With the vast majority of organizations operating across multiple deployment locations and form factors, clear, streamlined operational processes are no longer a “nice to have”—they’re a business-critical requirement.

What ops teams are thinking: “Just give me the answer”

Ops complexity is a byproduct of a lack of observability. It’s an all-too-common challenge for many of our customers and one that the industry has tried to solve for a long time. Most enterprises don't suffer from a lack of data, but rather from a lack of answers. Application delivery and security solutions like F5 BIG-IP generate volumes of useful data, but teams often struggle with translating that telemetry into actionable intelligence—and the ones that know how are in high demand and short supply.

Driven by visibility gaps, siloed views, or lack of subject matter expertise, straightforward answers to application health questions remain elusive. Compounding this challenge are other common factors such as an inability for teams to access relevant data, dashboard fatigue, reactive processes such as using data only after there’s a problem. missing connective tissue between apps and infrastructure, and a lack of guidance on what to do about identified gaps.

That lack of clarity has a profound impact on customers, operations teams, and the bottom line.

Without holistic observability and ops clarity for hybrid multicloud environments, teams can face a variety of business risks from increased risk of downtime, service degradation, and poor user experiences to security breaches, data loss, and regulatory non-compliance.

What is clear is that the current state of operations is no longer tenable.

Platforms to the rescue

SASE (a general representation on the left) secures and connects the hybrid workforce, while F5 ADSP (figure on the right) delivers and protects the hybrid application estate—two converged platforms serving different domains of the enterprise.

In a previous blog, I covered the difference between two complementary platforms: Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and ADSP. In a nutshell, SASE addresses the needs of the hybrid workforce—providing critical delivery and security services for employees, devices, and browsing sessions. ADSP was built to serve the needs of applications and APIs—functioning as a reverse proxy and ensuing availability, performance, and security of applications at massive scale, across data centers, cloud, and edge. These two different but connected platforms are the driving force behind the modern enterprise.

Both platforms offer promise, but that promise only materializes when it can be operated consistently across environments and teams. Streamlined, scalable operational workflows require observability that can continuously transform telemetry into action.

F5 Insight for ADSP: The continuous “see and do” cycle

F5 Insight for ADSP brings XOps to life with a converged platform that reduces complexity and streamlines operations.

The F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) emphasizes visibility by default; the different aspects of the platform can inspect application traffic, determine the correct destination server, and identify malicious traffic or encrypted threats. And it’s F5 Insight, a core component of F5 ADSP that really brings observability and operational intelligence to life for XOps, acting as the brain of ADSP.

F5 Insight is the convergence of actionable intelligence, AI-powered guidance, and holistic observability—always with an eye toward improving application health, security, and ultimately the end user digital experience. There are two key differences between F5 Insight and “just another visibility tool.”

First, F5 Insight aligns to a continuous cycle of “see and do” that uses telemetry, historical trends, alerting, and AI-generated guidance to help teams find the correct path forward and use intelligence to inform decisions. F5 Insight adheres to the mantra that visibility without action is useless.

At a high level, F5 Insight works like this: Data collection → analysis → insights → optimization → reporting/integration/health checks → continuous improvement → data collection.

At a high level, F5 Insight for ADSP works as a continuous loop: Data collection → analysis → insights → optimization → reporting/integration/health checks → continuous improvement → data collection.

The second big difference is that F5 Insight, unlike visibility point solutions, helps different teams, with different priorities—like NetOps, SecOps, PlatformOps, analysts, or SREs speak a common language and operate as a single system. A regular source of frustration is NetOps and application owners not understanding each other’s worlds.

F5 Insight enables teams to see the other’s perspectives and connect the dots. An example of this would be NetOps and app owners agreeing that high CPU or memory utilization on BIG-IP impact that device’s ability to handle TLS handshakes, connection management, or load balancing decisions efficiently—ultimately driving slow page loads, timeouts, or intermittent failures, even if the application servers themselves are healthy.

The overall ADSP vision for XOps is to enable cross-functional teams to understand each other, solve operational challenges together, and deliver and secure every app, anywhere.

F5 Insight for ADSP: Providing actionable intelligence

F5 Insight for ADSP provides holistic observability and unified visibility across the application and infrastructure layers.

Our latest ADSP offering, F5 Insight for ADSP, is now generally available. This holistic observability and operational strategy solution represents the tip of the spear for XOps, providing unified visibility across application and infrastructure layers.

Using this intuitive tool, teams can improve holistically with end-to-end visibility and operational narratives. They can prioritize to-dos with alerts, anomaly detection, and report cards. They can surface value faster with views built by F5 experts. And they can get expert guidance and optimization recommendations via natural language (MCP/LLM).

Most importantly, different teams can enhance and improve how they work by using F5 Insight for ADSP to drive better operational outcomes. Consider the following:

• A single operational story: Operations teams don’t need another “single pane of glass.” They need a clear, comprehensive operational story. With F5 Insight for ADSP, that’s exactly what they get for their BIG-IP estates. F5 Insight provides unified observability from applications to infrastructure, helping teams connect the dots and see the complete picture. This connected view of the world fosters better understanding between historically disconnected teams, helping them work together more effectively to provide great digital experiences for the end user.
• Faster root cause discovery and recovery: When there’s an application outage, tensions run high and seconds can feel like decades. F5 Insight provides the data, detailed reporting, additional context, and natural language explanations that help teams get to the bottom of things quickly—greatly reducing mean time to identify (MTTI). But as you likely know, diagnosis is only half the battle. F5 Insight can also give teams prioritized action plans to remediate issues quickly, reduce mean time to repair (MTTR), and optimize deployments so they don’t happen again.
• Better security posture with visibility you can operationalize: You can’t secure what you can’t see. F5 Insight enables SecOps teams to greatly improve security with actionable intelligence that spans incidents, security-specific KPIs (like WAF events), identified vulnerabilities, deployed encryption protocols, and overall policy enforcement. These insights are contextualized with historical data, trends, and expected norms (overlaid against actual traffic) to help teams come up with their own definition of “good.” Leveraging this telemetry security, practitioners can find and address anomalies, improve policies, and proactively reduce gaps and blind spots.
• Simplified, streamlined reporting: A common workstream for many operations teams is regular reporting. Whether for their executive leadership or for compliance audits, reporting is a time-and-effort-intensive process that can often be daunting. F5 Insight helps minimize the pain of this regular task. With comprehensive visibility, teams can build executive reports in minutes using clear metrics views and report cards—and the process is as simple as exporting a dashboard. These same views and data sets can also be used to present evidence of adherence to regulatory mandates, so teams can reduce their risk profiles quickly and easily.
• Prove and extend the value of BIG-IP investments: As mentioned above, BIG-IP produces a ton of helpful telemetry. F5 Insight unlocks the full value of BIG-IP data, making useable and accessible to every team, at enterprise scale. With F5 Insight, teams can use telemetry across the organization to make the business case for migrations, refreshes, and additional resources. They can also prove the ROI of BIG-IP investments using data such as mitigated threats or application uptime.

Operational excellence by design

Hybrid multicloud complexity makes application health, security posture, and infrastructure performance hard to determine. F5 Insight for ADSP helps teams tackle this big challenge with observability that spans the entire app deployment landscape. This core component of F5 ADSP is the visibility foundation for XOps that helps teams better operate application delivery and security and improve deployments consistently and programmatically.

I invite you to explore F5 Insight for ADSP, get a demo, start seeing your most critical BIG ‑IP-powered application workloads in a whole new light, and operationalize that intelligence across your organization

Al so, be sure to read our previous blog post, in which we explore six critical questions F5 Insight for ADSP can help you answer.

About the Author

John MaddisonChief Marketing Officer | F5

John Maddison is F5’s Chief Marketing Officer. John has more than 30 years of experience leading product teams and corporate marketing functions in cybersecurity, cloud, and telecommunications. Prior to F5, John spent 12 years at Fortinet, most recently as Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Product Strategy. He previously held leadership positions at Trend Micro, Vina Communications, and Octel Communications. John holds a B.S. in Engineering degree from Plymouth University in Devon, England.

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