With the digital experience now the arbiter of customer loyalty and value, application developers cannot afford to wait days or even hours to diagnose and address application performance issues.
Troubleshooting application health and performance is challenging. Problems can stem from several causes such as flaws in the application code itself, network issues, an application-layer attack, or a spike in bot traffic (malicious or otherwise).
How do you employ the appropriate tools to identify the root cause of a performance issue and fix it quickly?
Capturing and visualizing the right data from the application traffic gives you the power to detect and diagnose application performance problems.
With F5 at the core of multi-cloud application delivery, managing app performance is easier and more effective, thanks to a centralized collection of network and application layer data.
F5 leverages deep telemetry data from the application and network to provide companies the insight they need to optimize performance—regardless of the cause. Shared dashboards give NetOps, DevOps, and SecOps teams access to the data they each care about while also supporting collaborative problem solving.
NetOps teams can see resource utilization spikes that let them head off performance issues.
SecOps teams can keep an eye on rate of attacks and make note of any spikes.
DevOps teams can focus on individual application health and performance.
You need the right toolset to inspect, capture, and display your application traffic telemetry.
To get great visibility and monitoring, you first need systems capable of capturing network traffic and interpreting the application-layer data it represents.
The F5 BIG-IP Application Delivery Controller (ADC) has a full-proxy design that decrypts and inspects application traffic to perform request routing, optimize performance, or block malicious traffic or bots. The data from all of these layers—from endpoint location (via an onboard GeoIP address database) to request and response details—can be streamed in multiple formats from the platforms at high speed and with low overhead.
With F5, you can export application-, network-, and platform-layer telemetry to a range of formats for different endpoints, including both F5 and third-party solutions:
All these tools work slightly differently, but essentially, you need a solution to store, sanitize, and index your data in order to create reports, alerts, and dashboards.
Not everyone needs the same data. App teams will care more about application stats like latency, page load times, or error codes. Infrastructure teams need to monitor platform performance and system alerts. Security teams will be looking for anomalies and attack detection rates.
If you’re streaming to BIG-IQ, the preconfigured application telemetry dashboard provides an interactive, per-application, visibility tool that gives you the most detailed data and analysis of any supported platform—and presents important application and security metrics in an intuitive format.
Third-party visibility solutions can also provide useful reporting and analysis—and can correlate data from the BIG-IP platform with data from other parts of the infrastructure.
The F5 Telemetry Streaming (TS) extension allows you to aggregate, normalize, and forward statistics and events from the BIG-IP platform to a consumer-data consuming application or service. You can configure the TS extension via a declarative API and it can send different data sets to different consumers.
If you need to monitor and troubleshoot your applications, F5 solutions can provide you with the right data about your app and client traffic. F5 combines the BIG-IP system—a powerful tool that’s perfectly positioned to collect and interpret network and application traffic (as well as manage and protect it)—with a powerful analysis tool like BIG-IQ Centralized Management.
With F5, you get the data you need—displayed to the people and systems that need it.
Get all the details about monitoring and managing F5 application services with BIG-IQ in the BIG-IQ deployment guide.