Lost and Found: A Simple Solution to a Difficult Problem
Pause for a minute and ask yourself the following questions:
- Do you know how many apps you have?
- Do you know how those apps are performing?
- Do you know what those apps are doing?
These questions may seem very basic, right? However, many enterprises are struggling to find answers to them. But why?
As the computing world has evolved in the past few years, we often hear from customers that obtaining information about their applications is harder than ever. Sure, there are more tools than ever to help solve this problem…although the challenge is really in the number of technology ecosystems an organization uses at any particular time. Most organizations operate multiple application ecosystems, from legacy systems to more modern systems tailored for web-based user experiences to brand new applications built to leverage microservices, containers, and cloud environments. And with all these ecosystems there are specialized analytics and monitoring tools that go along with them.
The challenge isn’t a lack of tools, or data, it’s a lack of visibility—analytics and insights on every link in the chain that it takes to deliver an application from code to customer. So, let’s focus on visibility from an application-centric perspective...
Business Line Managers and App Owners are accountable for the overall health and performance of the applications used by their end-customers. This accountability usually manifest itself in strong SLAs. However, what good is an SLA, if you cannot understand how all the interdependent components in the entire app delivery pipeline are related and performing. Beyond just health and performance what we hear from IT leaders is they need to understand and leverage insights from their application landscape.
Enter F5 Beacon, the company’s new SaaS offering that provides visibility and insights into the health and performance of applications. Driven by an application-centric approach, F5 Beacon empowers leaders to understand their applications better and, as a result, obtain powerful insights to improve user experience, increase business value and returns, or simply just to sleep better at night.
F5 Beacon allows customers to quickly define applications, associate unique metadata, and stream telemetry from a multitude of sources (see Figure 1). By leveraging data from diverse sources in the application delivery pipeline, F5 Beacon can present (see Figure 2) and fuse data to provide insights across the breadth of systems and environments that the application is delivered through.
F5 Beacon integrates with automation pipelines through robust declarative APIs and F5 commercial and open-source technology ecosystems and applications. For instance, leveraging the open-source Telegraf project, customers can easily create a custom insight to monitor a particular application URL and report on its health. See Figure 3.
So, how can we help you leverage all this information? Well, to help IT leaders maximize business value and make informed business decisions, F5 Beacon provides powerful and easy-to-consume pre-built or custom app insights across the Security, Operations and Cost dimensions. We started this blog with three simple questions, but those questions are just the beginning. By fusing your data and telemetry into a single, holistic, application-centric view, Beacon can answer much deeper questions such as the ones highlighted in Figure 4.
To learn more about F5 Beacon and take advantage of the 45-day free trial, visit https://f5.com/beacon-get-started.