F5 Big-IP Review
February 16, 2024
F5 Big-IP Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with F5 BIG-IP
I think LTM is pretty self-explanatory. That's pretty much what everybody uses, so I'll stay away from that one. The biggest use case for us is protecting our medical record systems. With WAF, it's very flexible. There's a lot of cloud products out there from other vendors who we tried to use and they just didn't have all the knobs, bells and whistles that Big IP has. And we also work very closely with a vendor who works with F5 as well. So we have build guides available to us by going with F5 as opposed to other vendors. So being able to protect our workloads, customize apps, apply threat campaigns, IPI, it gives us some peace of mind as far as protecting our healthcare from attack.
- I really like the flexibility. We have weekly meetings with our medical records admins and we go over all of our false positives and apply changes and custom scripting to make sure users can access the data effectively. It's really flexible and easy to manage.
- So our current issue that we're seeing, we just upgraded to version 15 and there's some JSON validation issues that we're seeing that are causing us some headaches. There's tons of false positives with it and we're working our way through it. Support has been a little difficult. They're aware of the issue, but I don't think there's really a resolution yet.
- Very positive. Deployment is very quick. F5's kind of new 4A2 software has allowed us to spin up VMs on demand. And now instead of having an appliance that serves maybe 15 or 20 different apps, I can now spin up custom VMs specific to one or two different things. So we run our SIEM on an LTM box and we run our logging instances on a dedicated box. So by going into virtualization, that's made our jobs way easier. Excellent.
So the cloud versions, and admittedly we did not do the Imperva on-prem solution. We only went with cloud. There's a lot of idiosyncrasies, like you can't use real IP addresses, you must snap. And that caused us problems with DNS and DNS routing. So we had to turn on some features with F5 that did remediate the issue, like using the one connect profiles, but that did cause some other problems identifying traffic and we had to make some eye roll changes to use the exported four headers.
Do you think F5 BIG-IP delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with F5 BIG-IP's feature set?
Yes
Did F5 BIG-IP live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of F5 BIG-IP go as expected?
No
Would you buy F5 BIG-IP again?
No