#1 most frequent
United States of America
76.9%10 installations of 13
What is F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management?
F5's BIG-IQ provides centralized management of app services and security policies.
Categories & Use Cases
Videos
Who Buys & Uses F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management
#2 most frequent
Australia
7.7%1 installation of 13
#3 most frequent
India
7.7%1 installation of 13
Pros
- Robust license management for F5 products
- Effective SSL certificate management
- Orchestration of backups for disaster recovery
Cons
- Challenges with configuration deployment and reuse
- Cumbersome and unintuitive user interface, especially for deployment jobs
- Platform stability issues, including problematic upgrades and frequent component restarts
Solid with a room for improvement.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We used F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management as a license manager until we changed to FCP where the licensing is directly in the cloud now. Aside from that to monitor VDI sessions into our Citrix environment and for automation, upgrades and mainly pushing scripts to our BigIP fleet.
Pros
- License mgmt
- automation
- upgrades
Cons
- RBAC
- Very granular access to resources - menus
- Object management
- Monitoring
Return on Investment
- Improved upgrade times and complexity to a matter of steps and clicks
- Some limitation for DR task when the CM peer is in a different DC
- While it collects telemetry data there is no really efficient way to display important information and export it
Usability
Other Software Used
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, GitHub, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Visual Studio Code
F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management Facelift
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I currently use this product for SSL certificate management and a tool to use for discovery when I am needing to research a VIP, cert, pool or profile. It is essential to my everyday workload.
Pros
- Easy to search what you are looking for
- Certificate management
- Health checks when deployments are pushed
Cons
- Automation, specifically when it comes to pinning policies
- Auto detect issues like a LTM's name not matching the physical LTM
Return on Investment
- Helps me deploy certs to multiple LTMs at a click.
Usability
F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management review
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use it fairly minimally. we use it for licensing and capturing backups. haven't had a lot of luck doing much else with it.
Pros
- licensing
Cons
- cumbersome interface
- not intuitive
- things don't always work well
Return on Investment
- the licensing is good value and worth it for that functionality in particular
- for automating centralizing, things like Ansible and Terraform seem like a better approach and using GitOps with a repo as a source of truth and managing as code. for this reason don't have much use for the centralized management features.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
HashiCorp Terraform, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and GitHub
F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management has its challenges but works
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I use F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management to push daily changes such as VIP, Pool, nodes, monitors... creation, delete, updates. BigIQ helped me to see all my BigIPs in one place and it helped me a lot in software upgrades. With BigIQ I also took advantage of pushing scripts to several devices at same time, reducing the amount of time I use to take =, doing them on every single Big-IP.
Pros
- Software upgrades
- Pushing scripts
- Basic Big-IP management
Cons
- Export simple reports such as device inventory, VIPs inventory
- Performance
- Ability to rename objects
Return on Investment
- In 2021 thanks to Big-IQ we drastically reduced the time we spend on software upgrades.
- BigIQ helped us to have visibility of our Big-IP environment in one place.
Other Software Used
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
BIG-IQ
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We utilize BIG-IQ to manage several BIG-IP deployments for several clients through our MSP practice. The platform continuously breaks and has to be fixed. We find ourselves spending more time fixing BIG-IQ than using it to deploy config changes to BIG-IPs.
Pros
- SSL Certificate Management
- UCS Backup Orchestration
- QKview Orchestration
Cons
- Upgrade of the BIG-IQ platform has never worked well, require command line intervention to complete the upgrade process.
- CPB constantly hangs, requiring restarts or reboots.
- Does not support FQDN nodes.
Return on Investment
- Time savings through orchestration of UCS backups
- Time savings from orchestration of QKview gathering
- Time savings in centralized Management of TLS/SSL certificate management
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Palo Alto Panorama, FortiManager, Junos Space Network Management and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller
Other Software Used
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF, F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM)
