F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect vs. OpsCompass

F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect Would be incredibly useful when having to juggle multiple cloud providers. Also XC would be fantastic for standardization and consistency of the whole networking stack. It may be less useful for incredibly specialized cases where very specific traffic manipulation is needed. Any use-cases with heavy APM usage would have to be carefully considered as those features didn’t make it into XC yet.

Incentivized

We previously had separate products to manage Azure and AWS, each with different capabilities, and it was very complex for our team to go back and forth and try to make sense of each environment. OpsCompass is very well suited to give you a single view of our entire cloud environment. OpsCompass also brings excellent compliance policies. We were not highly skilled with these policies, but the product made it easy to perform an assessment of our current state and identify areas where we had non-compliance issues. CIS policies were a great area to start and we later tried the Microsoft 365 policies, which were also helpful. More policies would be great to see.

• Centralized Hybrid ingress for our cloud workloads
• Centralized ingress for our existing on-prem BIG-IP devices
• Application visibility to address end-to-end visibility into the end-user experience

Incentivized

• Quick inventory of all my cloud resources
• Detects changes to my cloud resources--including the source of the changes (user or system)
• Cost impacts of changes to my cloud infrastructure

• The support model needs a quite a bit of work. I personally have experienced an outage on the platform. due to mis-configureation Although the outage was due to engineer error it took over 2 hours before we were able to speak to an engineer
• Proxy v2 protocol to allow our organization to capture and view the source IP address

Incentivized

• I would like to see more integrations to help surface alerts. Slack would be great, as an example.
• An imbedded tour or onboarding would help our new users, but overall, the product is pretty easy to figure out

Overall, F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect is responsive and has many features. There is minor clunkiness in how certain scroll bars are layered. This may cause some adverse experience when trying to manage this product through a zoomed browser. Page loading and refresh timers were all very much responsive. There is a good amount of feedback from the interface as well.

Incentivized

Aviatrix operates like a slightly different version of XC. Mostly it relies on routing, where cloud connect takes a whole stack into consideration. Not sure if XC can fully replace Aviatrix, but after a couple of implementations, it may become apparent. There are similar routing features in both. XC has more overall features.

Incentivized

In this price range, we didn't find any other tools that provide this degree of cloud resource visibility. It's been an efficiency game-changer. I hope we'll see new modules as they expand their features to include active resource management policies. They've done such a good job of anticipating the needs of our CloudOps team, I plan to evaluate those new features (if/when they arrive).

• Is a niche segment and it provides a rich set of features that supports our use case

Incentivized

• Our team was able to do roughly 30% more with the product. The automation helps us spot issues without a lot of manual work
• We identified changes that would have had a massive cost impact--spinning up or forgetting about infrastructure we didn't need.
• OpsCompass prevents configuration drift and maintains a healthy state across multi-clouds.