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F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

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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Network Engineer for Canadian Tire Gets Candid | F5 BIG IP ITM Review
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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/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Details

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.

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) Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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, 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

(38)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Load Balancing Functionality: Users have praised the platform for its efficient load balancing feature, which helps balance and distribute connection traffic between multiple nodes of web servers, reducing downtime when an ISP is down. The ability to serve over 20 thousand concurrent connections on a single virtual server for handling API gateway for a mobile app was highly valued by users.

High Availability and Redundancy: Some reviewers have positively acknowledged the platform's redundancy and failover capabilities, along with its traffic shaping and high availability features. The platform's ability to handle health checks for servers and apps, load balance anything on the network, and support high availability was praised.

SSL Offloading Capability: Users appreciated the SSL offloading feature for enhancing server monitoring capabilities and simplifying the management of nodes and pools. The ease of updating SSL certificates seamlessly without user impact or downtime was noted as a beneficial feature by users.

Patching and Bug Issues: Some users have mentioned that the patching of services and bugs, at times, affects functionality negatively, leading to potential disruptions in operations. This can result in downtime or performance issues if not addressed promptly.

Complex Web-Based UI Navigation: Users have expressed concerns about the complexity of the web-based UI, suggesting further simplification for easier navigation. For instance, some find it challenging to locate functions like SSL cert uploads due to the abundance of menus, which can slow down tasks and increase user frustration.

Software Update Challenges: Several users have found it hard to update the software efficiently. This difficulty can be a time-consuming process and may require significant effort from users. It could lead to delays in implementing necessary updates or features, affecting overall system performance and security.

Reviews

(1-21 of 21)

f5 - you guys rock!

Rating: 10 out of 10
May 09, 2024
CG
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
1 year of experience
This used to be used for external DNS traffic. However, this is now being used as a load balancer. It works well for our organization.
  • Load Balancing.
  • External DNS Traffic.
  • DNS Traffic Pass-through.
Cons
  • Scalability
  • Flexible with other products.
  • Ease of use.
It has worked well in controlling some of the external network traffic.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager review

Rating: 10 out of 10
March 22, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
2 years of experience
Problem:
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
Cons
  • Detect public IP Address for audit trail if the traffic across other network devices
Recommended if we have more than 1 ISP, but not suitable if only have 1 ISP.

F5 Big IP review

Rating: 10 out of 10
March 22, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
2 years of experience
Problem:
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
Cons
  • Public IP address detection when across other network devices
Product proven, load balancing ISP, good performance

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager

Rating: 8 out of 10
March 22, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
1 year of experience
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
Cons
  • Patching of services and bugs may sometimes affect the functionality
When deploying an essential common service, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager can help to front the service and monitor the various members of the pool.

Use case of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager in a national pharmacy application project

Rating: 6 out of 10
March 22, 2024
Vetted Review
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
4 years of experience
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
Cons
  • Ability to have built in observability capabilities
  • AI ML LLM capability
  • Smart tuning features
Web traffic load balancing

Our Experience withF5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager

Rating: 10 out of 10
March 22, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
4 years of experience
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
Cons
  • Web-based UI can be made even simpler
I think F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is a very versatile solution to publish applications.

F5 LTM to supporting BAU process

Rating: 9 out of 10
March 22, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
2 years of experience
We use LTM for our daily BAU, and it performs as we expected to load balance our servers
  • Load balance
  • Persistence profile
  • Source NAT
Cons
  • Use Raid 1 for disk configuration
This is a great product for doing load balancing between server members

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager review

Rating: 6 out of 10
March 22, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
15 years of experience
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager used for normal load balancing functions.
We use SSL offloading and virtualised appliances.
  • Good Loadbalancing functionality
  • Possible scripting
  • Reliable platform
Cons
  • User interface
  • API functionality
  • Automation
  • Performance monitoring
Basic load balancing functionality.

The F5 LTMs have had a very positive impact on our business objectives

Rating: 10 out of 10
February 13, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
12 years of experience
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.
Cons
  • Better web telemetry
  • Better tools to troubleshoot private interface connections. For example ping on the private interface
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) are well suited for web traffic management. F5 LTM aren't suited to act as a stateful firewall.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) An Indeed Need In The Apps World

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 13, 2024
Vetted Review
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
13 years of experience
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.
Cons
  • 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.
There was a need to have the DR environment to be available actively but not to send the traffic unless the production is down The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) priority feature helped achieving it. It was well suited in handling the HTTP headers using polices and iRules. It was less appropriate from the application security perspective in the current version. But after attending the AppWorld 2024, I see a lot of ways to protect the network and the application with several features.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is great

Rating: 10 out of 10
February 13, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
12 years of experience
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
Cons
  • Quicker and easier upgrades without downtime
  • More easily scalable
  • Easier to deploy and replicate
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is well suited for all different scenarios of application delivery. It excels in keeping applications highly available and secure. It has some room to grow for multi-cloud application delivery, but still meets all of our current needs

Ability to change HTTP headers and redirect traffic based on criteria in iRules

Rating: 10 out of 10
February 13, 2024
CW
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
10 years of experience
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
Cons
  • Time investment in creating Virtual Servers across many LTMs
  • Ability to change object names after creation
  • Support ability to troublshoot iRUles
Load balancing applications. Ability to change HTTP headers and redirect traffic based on criteria in iRules.

Positive ROI when the app dev have weird use case the F5 BIG-IP LTM can usually make that happen

Rating: 10 out of 10
February 13, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
3 years of experience
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
Cons
  • Not having a diff in the ansible modules
Anything the app would have issue with. The F5 BIG-IP LTM can patch that. example when the app is old and don't support all TLS version/cypher. Exposing api from multiple environment from the same VS.

Addressing high availability for our older legacy applications with F5 BIG-IP LTM

Rating: 8 out of 10
February 13, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
10 years of experience
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.
Cons
  • Hard to update.
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is well suited to balance anything that runs over the network. It doesn't even need to be a web application.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager has provided us more opportunities to expand our capabilities

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 13, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
1 year of experience
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
Cons
  • would like to see snat pools explained better

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) preserves resources in the virtualization environment

Rating: 10 out of 10
February 13, 2024
ED
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
12 years of experience
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
Cons
  • Next is fixing everything
I giev F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) a ten out of ten because Netscaler is second-rate

Redundancy and failover capabilities

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 13, 2024
Vetted Review
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
12 years of experience
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
Cons
  • More persistence options
  • additional custom monitors to be imported
Replacing NetScaler for just F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for application scale and redundancy in a localized environment

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 09, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
12 years of experience
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
Cons
  • Scalability of platform, specifically management plane
  • Resource consumption
  • Segmentation of VIPs to prevent impact noisy neighbor vip
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is suited for application scale and redundancy in a localized environment. Does not seem suited for global applications.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manage is a huge part of our F5 solutions in day to day bsuiness and practices

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 09, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
2 years of experience
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
Cons
  • 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
i will reccomend the products of f5 to include ltm to all my colleagues because there is nothing better in terms of bleeding edge technology and provide next level support

Easy peasy

Rating: 9 out of 10
April 27, 2023
JC
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
7 years of experience
Set up users in our environment to be able to login remotely through our department.
  • Load balance traffic
  • Reliable connections
  • Easy to manage
Cons
  • Better dashboard
Good product for leveraging traffic, and endpoint management

The best and easy to use feature rich load balancer

Rating: 9 out of 10
September 05, 2022
MY
Vetted Review
Verified User
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
3 years of experience
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
Cons
  • UI is dated
  • Logs are not easily to parse and read
  • Upgrade process is lengthy and time-consuming
If you do not have a load balancer appliance and you have to host multiple applications for thousands of users, the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is best suited for you. If you do not have SSL capabilities on your application server then you can use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to overcome that. However, if you have only a few applications and few users then the product will be overkill for you.
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