How F5 NGINX One Enhances Availability and Performance

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Jason Clopper Thumbnail
Jason Clopper
Published October 24, 2024

As organizations strive to deliver seamless digital experiences, ensuring application availability and optimizing performance are top priorities. F5 NGINX One simplifies this by empowering teams to proactively monitor and manage their application delivery infrastructure, ensuring high availability and performance even in the face of heavy traffic loads and complex environments. With NGINX One, organizations can take advantage of a wide range of native scalability capabilities by deploying instances across varied environments, including containers, VMs, bare metal, and Kubernetes.

Handling heavy traffic loads

NGINX, the open-source web server and reverse proxy, was specifically designed to handle heavy traffic loads efficiently. As the foundation of NGINX One, this ability is further enhanced with enterprise-grade features and observability.

The NGINX One Console offers a robust API with extensive metrics, enabling seamless monitoring and management of traffic spikes. By leveraging this and the NGINX One Console's configuration management features, users can easily scale their instances in response to unexpected heavy loads to ensure applications remain available and responsive.

Optimizing configurations

NGINX One's configuration recommendation engine plays a crucial role in identifying and fixing configuration errors and issues quickly and easily. Leveraging the years of experience of NGINX developers, the engine automatically reviews configurations and provides recommendations across three categories: security, optimization, and best practices.

Security recommendations are flagged with the highest priority, ensuring that applications remain secure and protected against potential vulnerabilities. Optimization recommendations focus on fine-tuning configurations to achieve optimal performance, while best practice recommendations provide guidance on industry-standard approaches.

Users can easily edit and update configurations within the NGINX One Console, eliminating the need for deep NGINX expertise. This streamlined process not only saves time but also reduces the risk of misconfigurations that could impact application availability and performance.

Identifying and fixing bottlenecks

NGINX One's performance monitoring feature provides a centralized view of all NGINX instances, enabling users to quickly identify and address bottlenecks. Whether an organization has a handful of instances or thousands, the platform flags instances that require attention based on key metrics such as high error rates (4xx or 5xx error codes, for example), unusually high network traffic, or high system resource utilization.

The overview dashboard highlights instances with these performance indicators, allowing users to proactively address issues before they escalate. NGINX One will integrate with the alerting and notification functionality of F5 Distributed Cloud Services, enabling users to obtain alerts through their preferred channels, such as Slack or PagerDuty.

By automating the process of identifying bottlenecks and providing real-time alerts, NGINX One eliminates the need for constant monitoring and reduces the time required to resolve performance issues. This proactive approach ensures that applications remain available and performant.

Real-time insights and observability

The NGINX One Console provides detailed real-time insights into the health, security, status, and performance of NGINX instances. The platform monitors critical aspects, such as instance uptime, traffic flow, and TLS certificate validity, flagging any potential issues for immediate attention.

Security vulnerabilities are closely monitored, with NGINX One providing details on each vulnerability, mitigation steps, and remediation guidance. This proactive approach ensures that applications remain secure and compliant, minimizing the risk of downtime due to security breaches.

NGINX One seamlessly integrates with existing observability, alerting, and logging platforms, leveraging industry standards soon to include OpenTelemetry. This simplifies the process of collecting and analyzing application delivery data, providing a holistic view of performance and availability.

As NGINX One continues to evolve, it will introduce more application-centric views and machine learning-based tools to further enhance observability and provide actionable insights. These advancements will enable organizations to proactively optimize their application delivery infrastructure and ensure optimal performance.

A game-changer for enterprises

NGINX One is a game-changer for enterprises seeking to ensure application availability and optimize performance in today's demanding digital landscape. By adopting NGINX One, enterprises can focus on innovation and delivering exceptional user experiences, confident in the knowledge that their application delivery infrastructure is optimized for peak performance and availability.

To experience NGINX One firsthand, check out these product demos on F5 DevCentral. These walkthroughs showcase how the SaaS-based web console enables teams to monitor certificates and CVEs, edit and update configurations, and synchronize settings across multiple instances using the Config Sync Group feature.