F5 Application Study Tool: Monitoring F5 BIG-IP Environments with OpenTelemetry
During his keynote address at February’s AppWorld conference in Las Vegas, F5 Chief Innovation Officer Kunal Anand introduced the F5 Application Study Tool (AST), a lightweight, modular tool designed to integrate seamlessly with existing F5 BIG-IP ecosystems to track and visualize data and provide a foundation for powerful, customizable insights.
“AST is a window into the soul of how you use BIG-IP,” said Anand. “Not just surface-level metrics but deep, meaningful insights … Using this tool is like going from a blurry snapshot to a high-definition, real-time video of your BIG-IP environment.”
AST uses modern open-source tools, including OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, and Docker to visualize data in pre-designed but customizable dashboards, allowing users to get more information about their BIG-IP deployments without heavy investments in new infrastructure. “What makes AST so special isn't just its capabilities, but its DNA. It leverages best-in-class open-source telemetry tools, and it runs anywhere,” said Anand.
Deep visibility into BIG-IP deployments
Given the integral role that BIG-IP plays by delivering applications and data in many organizations, maintaining insight into what’s happening within the BIG-IP ecosystem is critical. Having rich operational data plays a huge part in answering technical and business-related questions that may arise during both normal operations and times of trouble. But traditional telemetry tools often don’t give deep, customizable analysis and full visualization about what’s going on under the hood of BIG-IP.
AST provides deep visibility into BIG-IP deployments, significantly reducing the complexity and effort required to deliver metrics and insights at scale and build a strong foundation for ongoing observability and monitoring. Pre-built dashboards and configurable charts in AST clearly present BIG-IP telemetry data to quickly help identify bottlenecks, track performance metrics, and debug outages across the infrastructure. The tool analyzes application behavior, usage patterns, and other data for informed troubleshooting and to pinpoint the root cause of application issues before they escalate.
A strong foundation for observability
While AST is designed to help technical teams and administrators use open-source telemetry and visualization tools to improve their monitoring, diagnostic, and analysis workflows, it also provides multiple business benefits to organizations.
We asked Mike Waechter, senior manager of solutions engineering at F5, and Chris Hain, distinguished technologist at F5, to explain some of the features of AST and describe how the tool provides a strong foundation for observability and monitoring of BIG-IP environments.
“AST transforms raw data into actionable insights,” said Waechter. “It provides information on performance, security, and reliability of the entire BIG-IP infrastructure.” This is obviously critical for technical and infrastructure teams but it’s also important for business leaders. AST provides clear visibility into technical details over time and allows application owners to collaborate more effectively with infrastructure and security teams and place these conversations into an understandable workflow.
A single point of truth
AST provides a single point of truth for multiple teams and multiple layers of responsibility, and the data is visualized in clear, simple-to-comprehend dashboards, making technical details easy to grasp for audiences without deep technical know-how.
“You don’t have to be an expert to get value from AST,” said Hain. “Data can be displayed simply, on a scale of green or red, and application owners can self-serve and find out for themselves how well BIG-IP is working.” AST also reduces time to resolution when there are problems. Because the tool presents performance history, users can look back at reports and metrics over time to see where and when issues occurred.
Because the data is displayed so clearly, it’s also very useful for presenting investigatory or post-mortem efforts to business leaders who might not otherwise understand the raw data.
AST is also very useful for Day 2 post-configuration analysis, which is the process of reviewing, optimizing, and validating a system's configuration after initial deployment and set-up (which happens during the “Day 1” phase).
This analysis is important to ensure that the system performs as expected, remains secure, and aligns with operational needs. And because AST presents data and metrics from across the BIG-IP environment, it allows platform teams to be more proactive in anticipating problems that can diminish system performance and uptime.
“Having both historical and real-time data is important for Day 2 monitoring and troubleshooting,” said Hain. “It allows us to be a lot more proactive because with easy-to-track metrics, we don’t get caught by surprise if something breaks or slows down. If part of the system is approaching maximum bandwidth, that’s a lot easier to address if you have clear visibility into the data.”
Because all BIG-IP operational and performance data is gathered into a small set of dashboards, AST also improves the efficiency and effectiveness of monitoring. “For people in a security operations center, AST can provide advanced analytics to look at potential issues or anomalies,” says Waechter. If certain performance numbers are suddenly off—for instance, if applications are suddenly using a lot more resources on BIG-IP—there’s historical evidence about how the application performed in the past, and security teams can use that information to make an analysis.
“And while all these metrics have always been available, in the past you’d need to write some crazy script to pull the data out of these boxes,” added Hain. Now, with AST the data appears in a convenient, easy to read database. “You just go to one central location and find all the information,” he said.
A fully customizable tool
AST is also completely customizable and configurable. Forget static, rigid monitoring tools: Users can tailor AST’s open-source dashboards and integrations to their own unique requirements. Not only can they modify the dashboard itself, but they can change panels and customize colors within the dashboard or export the data from AST to their own existing production ops monitoring tools.
“Nothing is really set in stone,” said Waechter. “That’s truly powerful because you’re not stuck with some proprietary vendor’s way of viewing data. It’s truly open and you can display your metrics with whatever graphic solutions you prefer to make the data correlations easier to understand for any of your audiences.”
Users can also customize the dashboards to focus on specific metrics that are necessary for a role or a particular audience, without overwhelming them with unrelated information.
“Everyone has opinions about how data should be presented, and they’re all valid,” said Hain. “With AST, people are able to self-serve and present the data in ways that work for their operational flows and priorities. So go nuts.”
AST delivers the ability to move operational teams from reactive to proactive, and that’s a significant shift not just for operations but also for the larger business because it can help management foresee when problems may arise. “Having easy access to historical data that visualizes how systems have performed over time allows businesses to develop predictive analyses and prepare in advance for upcoming issues,” said Waechter.
For more information and to download the F5 Application Study Tool for free, go to Github.