F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager review
Problem:
1. Auto switch ISPs
2. Load balancing internet across ISPs
1. Auto switch ISPs
2. Load balancing internet across ISPs
Overview
What is F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)?
F5 states that the "brain" of the BIG-IP platform, Local Traffic Manager (LTM) intelligently manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure.
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What is F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)?
F5 states that the "brain" of the BIG-IP platform, Local Traffic Manager (LTM) intelligently manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure.
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- No setup fee
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)?
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) includes static and dynamic load balancing to eliminate single points of failure. Application proxies give users protocol awareness to control traffic for the most important applications. BIG-IP LTM also tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers in a group, ensuring that applications are not just always on, but also are easier to scale and manage. BIG-IP LTM delivers SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, to protect the user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.
BIG-IP LTM aims to improve page load times and the user experience with HTTP/2, intelligent caching, extensive connection optimization and management, and compression. It also makes real-time protocol and traffic-management decisions based on application and server conditions, enables rules customization and programmability, and TCP and content offloading.
With BIG-IP LTM users can monitor how applications are performing for real users based on application response times, network conditions, and user context. F5 Analytics captures application-specific statistics, such as URL, throughput, and server latency, reported at different levels of the service. BIG-IP LTM is designed to make it simple to integrate with existing tools using industry standards such as sFlow, SNMP, and syslog.
With BIG-IP LTM users can monitor how applications are performing for real users based on application response times, network conditions, and user context. F5 Analytics captures application-specific statistics, such as URL, throughput, and server latency, reported at different levels of the service. BIG-IP LTM is designed to make it simple to integrate with existing tools using industry standards such as sFlow, SNMP, and syslog.
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Features
- Supported: SSL Acceleration - Offloads SSL encryption from infrastructure and frees up resources to boost application performance.
- Supported: Full proxy provides inspection, management, and analytics of traffic entering and existing in the network.
- Supported: Automate layer 4-7 application services with F5's declaritive REST APIs.
- Supported: iRules scripting language—F5’s event driven traffic scripting interface—enables programmatic analysis, manipulation, and detection of all aspects of the traffic in networks
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Competitors
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
F5 states that the "brain" of the BIG-IP platform, Local Traffic Manager (LTM) intelligently manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure.
NetScaler ADC, HAProxy Community Edition, and Kemp LoadMaster are common alternatives for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM).
The most common users of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
(34)Reviews
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March 22, 2024
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager review
Problem:
1. Auto switch ISPs
2. Load balancing internet across ISPs
1. Auto switch ISPs
2. Load balancing internet across ISPs
- Reduce downtime when ISP is down
- Auto switch to another ISP when one of them down
- Load balancing the connection
- Detect public IP Address for audit trail if the traffic across other network devices
March 22, 2024
F5 Big IP review
Problem:
1. Have few ISP but need to manually change when 1 of them is down.
2. Manage load balancing from all ISP
1. Have few ISP but need to manually change when 1 of them is down.
2. Manage load balancing from all ISP
- Load balancing all ISP automatically
- Public IP address detection when across other network devices
March 22, 2024
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager
For our use case, we make use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to front and load balance critical services. Depending on the service, use the various load balancing available to optimize and increase availability. Using the pools and virtual servers monitoring available, verify and monitor the health of these applications and services.
- Load balancing
- Monitoring
- Patching of services and bugs may sometimes affect the functionality
March 22, 2024
Use case of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager in a national pharmacy application project
We use the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to load balance the Web traffic for our national level application Web services.
- Fail over when a node is down
- Balance and distribute the connection traffic between 4 nodes of Web servers
- Management of the load balancing policies
- Ability to have built in observability capabilities
- AI ML LLM capability
- Smart tuning features
March 22, 2024
Our Experience withF5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager
We are using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to deliver almost all of our applications, be it web-based apps, API gateway for mobile apps, and also act as an ingress controller to our Kubernetes environment. The load balancing capability and SSL offloading performance are top notch. The iRules feature gives us much needed flexibility.
- Serving more than 20 thousand concurrent connections on a single virtual server to handle API gateway for a mobile app
- Web-based UI can be made even simpler
March 22, 2024
F5 LTM to supporting BAU process
We use LTM for our daily BAU, and it performs as we expected to load balance our servers
- Load balance
- Persistence profile
- Source NAT
- Use Raid 1 for disk configuration
March 22, 2024
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager review
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager used for normal load balancing functions.
We use SSL offloading and virtualised appliances.
We use SSL offloading and virtualised appliances.
- Good Loadbalancing functionality
- Possible scripting
- Reliable platform
- User interface
- API functionality
- Automation
- Performance monitoring
We have a ton of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) in our environment. The business problems that our F5 LTMs address are how to front end new services like MS Teams call centers and integrate with Microsoft Azure SSO. We also use the F5 LTMs to front end our web infrastructure. Our F5s are being able to integrate with our Platform Engineering group on openshift.
- Does web traffic management very well.
- To allow API's to work with our in house services
- To make intelligent load balancing decisions.
- Better web telemetry
- Better tools to troubleshoot private interface connections. For example ping on the private interface
The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is used to load balance 100s of applications in both On-premise and Cloud in our organization. The applications are always deployed in more than 1 servers to maintain high availability in which case the F5 helps a lot of keep Active-Active application environment. There are some applications use priority base load balancing which is a key part of business need.
- iRules implementation in case of handling some critical routing logics.
- Policies to add/remove the HTTP response headers as required by the application and security to be compliance
- Import and update SSL certificates. It is very easy to update the certificate to the profiles seamlessly without impact to the users with no downtime.
- iRule editor is one of the places need a lot of improvement.
- Confirm alert window before performing any changes to the iRule or any virtual configuration changes.
- Undo option would be a good feature to add in case any mistyping or human error happened while saving a change. Right now, once the change is made, there is no way of going back unless I copy or take a screenshot of the current configuration in order to go back. It also impacts the application until the old configuration is put back.
February 13, 2024
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is great
We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to securely deliver all of our applications in a safe and redundant fashion. LTM helps us keep a stable and efficient application environment and ensures our applications are always highly available to our customers and are delivered fast and securely
- Application Delivery
- Load Balancing
- Security
- Programmable via iRules
- Quicker and easier upgrades without downtime
- More easily scalable
- Easier to deploy and replicate
We load balance majority of your applications to provide redundancy across datacenters. We also provide APM based SSL VPN access to uses and business partners. Provide SSL cert offloading when necessary. We have moved a VE F5 infrastructure in the U.S. Looing forward to migrating into BigIP NEXT.
- Load balancing
- APM provides a secure SSL VPN Solution
- Capability of running on modern hypervisors
- Time investment in creating Virtual Servers across many LTMs
- Ability to change object names after creation
- Support ability to troublshoot iRUles
February 13, 2024
Positive ROI when the app dev have weird use case the F5 BIG-IP LTM can usually make that happen
I use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to load balance between servers OnPrem and sni policy to our apps deployed in the cloud.
- load-balancing
- HA flip from standby to active instantly
- api documentation
- Not having a diff in the ansible modules
We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to Load Balance our critical internal and external applications. This helps us address high availability for our older legacy applications as well as the newer ones. LTM is important because it load balances much more than just web applications.
- Health Checks for servers and apps
- Load Balances anything on the network.
- Supports High Availability.
- Hard to update.
February 13, 2024
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager has provided us more opportunities to expand our capabilities
I used F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for load balancing in our organization. I do like the management of the local traffic and how its broken down. It provides us easy manageability of our nodes and pools. We do have some other issues with the F5, but not necessarily related to LTM.
- management of nodes and pools
- management of networks Vips and vlans
- would like to see snat pools explained better
February 13, 2024
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) preserves resources in the virtualization environment
I use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for balancing application traffic across a collection of servers. Used to facilitate patching without interruption primarily. Distributes load across multiple servers.
- load balance
- Route into private VLANs
- Next is fixing everything
February 13, 2024
Redundancy and failover capabilities
I use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for load balancing for core business applications for customers
- Redundancy and failover capabilities
- Traffic Shaping
- High Availability
- More persistence options
- additional custom monitors to be imported
February 09, 2024
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for application scale and redundancy in a localized environment
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is used to provide scaling for applications by distributing traffic across multiple servers in an environment with 80,000+ applications. Also deployed to multiple datacenters in order to provide disaster recovery / redundancy.
- Pool member monitoring / health check
- Ease of deployment
- Use of parent profiles for configuration consistency
- Scalability of platform, specifically management plane
- Resource consumption
- Segmentation of VIPs to prevent impact noisy neighbor vip
February 09, 2024
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manage is a huge part of our F5 solutions in day to day bsuiness and practices
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is a huge part of our F5 solutions in day to day bsuiness and practices. we love the use of f5 to quickly and efficiently deploy vips and provide customers with performance and monitoring for the applications and databases. i really enjoy the speed at which i can deploy something and get to work on the next project.
- deployment of nodes pools and vips
- troubelshooting and health checks
- open support calls quickly qkview
- less menus to locate functions like ssl cert uploads
- one management pane to view all f5 configs for inside dmz and off prem f5s
- ltm can be stream lined for future uses in deployment of configs
April 27, 2023
Easy peasy
Set up users in our environment to be able to login remotely through our department.
- Load balance traffic
- Reliable connections
- Easy to manage
- Better dashboard
September 05, 2022
The best and easy to use feature rich load balancer
We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to host all our applications and servers. The main purpose is to load balance the traffic. This will ensure high availability to the users. Also, it allows for offloading SSL connections, which means that the processing power of the application and server is saved. Finally, this is will hide the application servers from the user and make it more secure.
- Load Balancing
- SSL Offloading
- Server Monitoring
- UI is dated
- Logs are not easily to parse and read
- Upgrade process is lengthy and time-consuming