TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Score9.7 out of 10

94 Reviews and Ratings

Get a Demo

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.

Read more details.

Categories & Use Cases

Who Buys & Uses F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

What users are saying about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM).
View all F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) reviews

Pros

  • Robust and industry-standard load balancing for diverse applications.
  • Efficient SSL/TLS offloading for secure traffic processing.
  • Exceptional application performance with low latency.

Cons

  • User interface (GUI) and navigation are often considered unintuitive.
  • Configuration and management can be complex, requiring CLI for advanced features.
  • Adaptability and flexibility in public cloud deployments need improvement.

High - Performance Application Delivery You Can Trust.

Incentivized
Sam Holmes
Business Development Manager VICSATAS in Research Development at Greenline LLC (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager helps our organization keep critical business applications available and performing reliably. It addresses challenges such as application downtime, traffic congestion, and inconsistent user experiences by balancing workloads across servers. Our use case covers internal business systems, client-facing applications, and collaboration tools used by teams across multiple offices and construction sites, helping ensure uninterrupted operation and better productivity.

Pros

  • Reliable application delivery for both internal users and customer-facing services.
  • High availability for business-critical application and service.
  • Automatic failover to healthy servers, minimizing downtime.
  • Scalable architecture that supports growing application and user demand.

Cons

  • The initial setup and configuration can be complex, requiring experienced administration.
  • Built-in automation capabilities could be expanded to reduce manual configuration tasks.

Return on Investment

  • Reduced application downtime and business disruption.
  • Enhanced business continuity with automated failover.
  • Strong long-term ROI despite higher initial investment.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Kemp LoadMaster, NGINX Plus and A10 Thunder ADC

Other Software Used

Microsoft Azure, Cisco Secure Firewall, Microsoft 365

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Incentivized
Jonathan MongeauView profile
Network Infrastructure Engineer in Information Technology at PNC Bank (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is the backbone of our organization’s traffic management system and delivers phenomenal performance for the multitude of services we rely upon internally and globally. As a financial services company, we require solutions that provide reliable performance and quality and F5 has been able to deliver. The other end of this is when things go badly; the ability to address problems within the BIG-IP ecosystem is considerably easier because the experience is catered towards engineers like myself where we need the telemetry and data to quickly diagnose problems.

Pros

  • Performance
  • Reliability
  • Quality support

Cons

  • The user experience within the WEBUI

Return on Investment

  • I’m not in a position to say anything on this matter

Usability

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Review

Incentivized
Rob SutherlinView profile
Sr. Network Engineer in Information Technology at Xcel Energy (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) or all of our applications across multiple environments - some of which require strict regulation and cannot openly communicate between the two environments. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) allows us to create application resiliency, security and reporting.

Pros

  • Load balancing
  • traffic processing through irules
  • SNAT configurations

Cons

  • renaming VIPS if they are incorrectly made. You have to delete the VIP and start over from the beginning
  • Logging can get very chatty

Return on Investment

  • It has allowed us to let application developers know that the issues are with their application and not due to the network, because of where it sits. This has been invaluable when troubleshooting issues when they arise. Knowing whether or not traffic is even hitting the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), either ingress or outgoing. If the Dev's information is not even making it to the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), we can quickly tell them and let them figure the issue out on their own, saving the rest of the Network Team from getting that 2am call.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

NetScaler and Citrix Gateway

Other Software Used

F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall), F5 BIG-IP, F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator

Big-IP LTM rocks

Incentivized
Thiago Cardoso
Network engineer in Information Technology at GE (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use F5 Big-IP LTM in my organization to load balance Apps with onPrem and Cloud pool members.

Pros

  • Exceptional Performance
  • Very good handling SSL
  • Security

Cons

  • It would be nice if I could just rename an object such as VIP. It is not cool when I need to delete and re-create an object just because I want to change its name.
  • I would like to be able to see orphans objects directly from GUI, not just from ihealth.
  • I would like to be able to delete VIPs and associated objects in a single shot from GUI.
  • GUI could have a `make a wish` button

Return on Investment

  • Not able to provide numbers but LTM had improved tremendously the Apps availbility

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Azure Load Balancer

Other Software Used

F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management

Incentivized
Sameer Sutikshan
Network Engineer in Information Technology at Canadian Tire (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using this product as a matter of LTM, application delivery, and it addresses problems like SSL, offloading, bridging, and it gives more control on the client side, on the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager, not on the servers.

Pros

  • So this product does the certification, the client, SSL, the TCP, the STTP profile, the search and keys and all of that stuff.

Cons

  • We can improve this product in OCSP, stapling, CRL revocation list, cipher controls, and that's about it.

Return on Investment

  • It has a lot of positive impact. It made application deployment pretty simple and easy

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Alternatives

Products similar to F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) that may also meet your needs.
View all F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) alternatives
NGINX
CompareLearn more
NetScaler
CompareLearn more
Kemp LoadMaster
CompareLearn more
Radware Alteon
CompareLearn more
HAProxy Community Edition
CompareLearn more
A10 Thunder ADC
CompareLearn more