How F5 NGINX One Enhances Management and Observability

As the number of applications across hybrid and multicloud enterprise environments increases, the need for effective management, security, and observability of these applications has become more pressing than ever. F5 NGINX One is designed to address these challenges by offering a unified solution for monitoring, managing, and securing modern application infrastructures. By simplifying the way organizations manage their NGINX instances (both F5 NGINX Plus and Open Source instances), NGINX One ensures that all teams across the enterprise—including Platform, Security, NetOps, and DevOps teams—can maintain real-time visibility into performance, security, and compliance across all environments, ultimately enhancing efficiency and reducing operational complexity.

NGINX One revolutionizes the way organizations manage their NGINX deployments by providing a centralized SaaS-based web console. This eliminates the need for manual configuration and updating tasks, such as emailing teams, waiting for responses, or running network scans to understand NGINX usage and versions. Before NGINX One, users had to go through the cumbersome process of obtaining IP addresses, SSH access, and root permissions just to view or modify configurations.

NGINX One makes staging configuration updates simple through a side-by-side visual difference (diff) view. Users can clearly see the impact of their changes before publishing without leaving the console. This eliminates the need for direct server access and simplifies the entire configuration management process. While not a full replacement for GitOps, NGINX One saves a small number of diffs of configuration changes, allowing for easy rollbacks when needed. NGINX One’s API enables programmatic configuration changes, facilitating integration with existing pipelines and workflows.

NGINX One transforms collaboration by offering a graphical user interface console that visually presents easy-to-grasp representations of complex text-based NGINX configuration files. This intuitive interface simplifies cross-functional collaboration sessions, making it easier for managers and developers to understand and make decisions. Developers retain the ability to access fine-grained text configurations within the console, ensuring detailed control without sacrificing the benefits of a unified interface.

The clustering feature, or sync groups, streamlines the management of multiple NGINX instances behind a load balancer. By adding NGINX instances to a sync group, users can apply configuration changes simultaneously across all instances. This ensures consistency and eliminates the need for manual synchronization or external automation tools, saving time and reducing the risk of misconfigurations.

NGINX One provides out-of-the-box visibility into crucial application and system metrics such as CPU, memory, disk space, and network traffic, eliminating the need to invest in separate monitoring systems. Layer 7 insights, including the number of failing HTTP connections, are readily available without the need for manual log analysis or custom dashboards. Previously, users needed to access each instance individually for insights. NGINX One brings this information to the forefront, making it easily accessible.

Recommendations based on configuration, performance, security, and operational best practices are provided across the entire NGINX fleet. The total number of recommendations and security-specific recommendations are prominently displayed on the first dashboard, giving managers an easy-to-access, high-level view of any issues. While recommendations are currently generated based on a static list of best practices, NGINX is actively working to implement AI-powered recommendations. By analyzing well-performing instances and comparing them to underperforming ones, the platform will provide tailored suggestions for optimization.

NGINX One takes the burden of compliance and security off the shoulders of teams and team leaders. It automates compliance checks by displaying vulnerabilities and remediation steps directly in the console. This eliminates the need for costly third-party vulnerability scanners and simplifies the process of upgrading and patching, ensuring organizations stay current with security best practices.

Looking ahead, NGINX One will introduce automated policy enforcement through templates. Super admins will have the ability to create templates with predefined options and limited customization. This feature will ensure consistent and compliant configurations across the organization, reducing the risk of human error and enhancing an organization’s security posture.

NGINX One simplifies the licensing and support process by consolidating multiple SKUs into a single, easy-to-buy offering—enterprises only need to choose between standard or premium support, and if they want to have F5 NGINX App Protect WAF. This streamlined approach reduces the complexity of purchasing and renewal processes, particularly for large organizations with intricate procurement workflows. Customers gain clarity on what they need and what's included in their subscription.

The simplified licensing model accelerates deployment and adoption by minimizing friction in the procurement process. This is particularly valuable for large enterprises that have grown through mergers and acquisitions, where multiple purchasing departments may be involved.