F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management vs. SmartDeploy

F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management works perfectly in Software upgrades and simple daily changes. We are successfully using it to create and or delete objects. It doesn`t works well when we need reports. I usually have to create custom scripts to get a list of objects, for example. Performance is also something that could be improved in Big-IQ

Incentivized

Well suited scenarios : One of the situations SmartDeploy helped immensly was in application deployment and management for our projects , making it and instant favorite for the deployment process. Also in one situation where we had a high flying app development which did'nt had much time to develop, deployment thorugh smart deploy made it quick and less involvement. Easier to understand major functionalities and onboard new projects. Less appropriate scenarios: We faced issues while utilising by DevOps team for monitoring every system for issue resolving in linux update on every employees system. This created alot of delay in every employees work front as systems were not working as expected

Incentivized

• Common system level changes like cipher suite customization, ssh protocol settings etc can be pushed to all F5 gear through one click of a button
• Enterprise standard templates for profiles/protocols etc., can be efficiently managed across F5 gear through a single interface

Incentivized

• It allows us to maintain only one image. Much less effort required than storing and maintaining multiple images.
• LAN deployment works very well with few issues.

Incentivized

• There a lack of the going forward to next
• The second site product does not do what we need and we are forced to write our own scripts
• Many of the alerting that was in enterprise management is no longer in F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management

Incentivized

• Remote monitoring is useful but has some lagging and functionalities are not upfront to use , making it complicated for new users to be aware just by using the application
• Windows migration was quite difficult in terms of updates of softwares to be migrated to new system
• Integration with client systems can be tough as major usage of other softwares is done in most of client systems causing us difficulties to integrate with smart deploy on the same platform

Incentivized

There is some room for improvement around RBAC. The access to certain features, options and menus is not straightforward and not that granular.

Incentivized

I feel pinning policies are killing you guys when it comes to being able to add multiple LTMs that have different naming conventions.

Incentivized

The support is a bit complex and not straightforward. It seems there aren't many engineers supporting this platform. There are many components in the solution that makes it complex for troubleshooting. Documentation needs to be more in depth, and I have opened a few cases around cluster sync issues and objects stalled. In the end I was able to find and fix the problem.

Incentivized

SmartDeploy customer support has been very good. Although we do not always get a super-fast response (though always within the time stated). The tech support folks at SmartDeploy always go the extra mile to see that our immediate issues are taken care of in as timely a manner as possible. They have always been attentive to our needs and frustrations.

Incentivized

Of all the centralized Management platforms I have ever used, BIG-IQ is the worst. It constantly breaks and requires fixing in some way or another.

Incentivized

SmartDeploy has a fantastic deployment process management with detailed and configurable aspects. Even though it has detailed configuration it still somehow makes it easy to understand and implement compared to other services which need special learning and courses to understand them completelya and use them efficiently. This is one quality highly appreciated and stacks up against any other services I have used for deployment

Incentivized

• Cut costs by requiring less manual hours to manage F5 OS installations
• Great monitoring and alerting tool for general F5 gear health
• Provides critical information for capacity planning of the F5 resources

Incentivized

• Very fast as an image deployment solution for new PCs. We do not have to create a completely new image when new hardware comes out. This is an amazing time-saver on its own.
• With offline deployment and some workarounds, this is allowing us to migrate many Windows 7 units, rather than having to upgrade each one or load from scratch or replace it with new hardware.

Incentivized