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F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management

Score8.6 out of 10

23 Reviews and Ratings

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What is F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management?

F5's BIG-IQ provides centralized management of app services and security policies.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management.
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Solid with a room for improvement.

Incentivized
Ivan Gutierrez
Network Engineer Sr. in Information Technology at Vw Credit, Inc (1001-5000 employees employees)

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

Incentivized
Kristen McGee
Network Engineer in Information Technology at HCA (10,001+ employees employees)

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

Incentivized
Mike Runge
F5 Service Owner in Information Technology at Eli Lilly and Company (10,001+ employees employees)

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

Incentivized
Verified User
Contributor in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

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

Incentivized
Verified User
Vice-President in Engineering (1001-5000 employees employees)

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)

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