F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

We use the solution for its load balancing and web application firewall features.

The solution's valuable features are flexibility, stability, security, and performance.

The solution's hardware quality needs improvement. Also, its cloud-based anti-DDoS has limitations. It could be better.

We have been using the solution for four years.

It is a stable solution. I rate its stability a ten out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. I rate its scalability an eight out of ten.

The solution's technical support is good in some areas. Although, it could be faster.

Positive

In comparison with Barracuda, the solution has better performance.

The solution is easy to install. It takes a day to configure and requires three engineers to execute the process. Also, it requires one executive to maintain it.

The solution is good in terms of investment.

The solution is more expensive than Barracuda. We pay yearly for its support services. There are no additional costs involved apart from the standard license.

One must check the performance capacity of internal applications while using the solution, as wrong configurations lead to failure in accessing them.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The use case for F5 includes ADC, WAF (Web Application Firewall), network firewall, and CGNAT in one platform.

The combination of ADC and WAN is the most valuable feature. 

F5 is a bit expensive in comparison. Moreover, there is room for improvement in the user interface. It can be more user-friendly. 

I have been using this solution for three years. 

It is a stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

The scalability is good. I would rate it a ten out of ten. There are over 50 users in our organization using the solution. Mostly the manager and the person in charge use this solution, but we usually work with the security and network teams as well.

The customer service and support team is quite good. 

The initial setup is quite complex. It took us around one to two months to deploy the solution. 

For the deployment process, we have to perform an assessment because it's quite complex. There are a lot of parameters that need to be counted before redeployment. So, an assessment is recommended before the deployment process.

We use the yearly-based license. I have personally not seen any additional costs. 

I would definitely recommend it. I would advise them to check their requirements thoroughly in order to load balancing and also to protect their data.

Overall, I would rate the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager a ten out of ten. 

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) has EC, WAF, firewall, network firewall, and CGNAT in one platform.

I like the combination of ADC and WAN in the solution. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) could be a bit better in regards to the pricing.

Kemp Loadmaster is cheaper compared to F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). Also, the solution's UI needs improvement.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for three years.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

The solution's scalability is good. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. Around 50-100 of our customers use the solution.

The technical support is very good.

The solution's initial setup process was quite complex. It took around a month to two for the deployment process.

Regarding the deployment process, we have to do an assessment first because it's very complex. There are so many parameters that we have to count the deployments. So, an assessment could be better before the deployment process. We have a manager and a person in charge of technical maintenance, but we usually talk to security and work with the network team.

Though I have not seen a return on investment, I can say that it is a good solution.

Our company pays for the licensing cost on a yearly basis. Also, there are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Before choosing the solution, I suggest others check their requirements to ensure work and protect your data. I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten. 

I mainly use LTM to protect applications.

LTM's most valuable features include application security, data collection, and parameter-level rules. 

LTM would be improved with the inclusion of signature-based blocking. In the next release, LTM should include the ability to configure account details and access user logs.

I've been using LTM for six years.

LTM is a stable product.

LTM is scalable.

The initial setup is straightforward, so long as you have some understanding of the solution, and it should take around forty-five minutes. However, if you're unfamiliar with LTM, it will take longer.

I would recommend LTM to other users and give it a rating of nine out of ten.

We use this product to hide true identity of our web servers from external users while balancing the loads of those external users. 

For load balancing, we have various load balancing method. We can define these methods at the node or pool level. 

We are retail users and have lot of websites for online businesses to prevent attacks. On those sites, there is a WAF module that we also use, which prevents attacks on it. 

It acts as a reverse proxy for our web servers, and we can use certificate to protect from attackers and send encrypted traffic to F5 which then decrypt and passes to the internal server after encrypting again using a server-side certificate or sending in plain form.

It has helped a lot to protect our organization from external attacks, especially XSS or XSRF types of attacks. 

It serves as a reverse proxy for our web servers which takes the request from the internet users on F5 public-facing IP using an encrypted connection and then it decrypts the packet using a client-side certificate. We use server-side certificates to encrypt the traffic and send it to the server. Internet users never know what the real server IP is. It does NATing to hide the identity and it has an ASM module to protect it from web attacks.

There are a lot of good things this solution has, including:

The LTM module helps to load balance the traffic among the internal web server in our case using round robin and least connection method.

The ASM module prevents web attacks and protects our web servers.

The irule feature is used to write these irules to redirect the traffic or sometimes prevent automated attacks such as through BOTs where the distinction between real and fake users becomes increasingly tricky.

Its virtual servers have the option to configure other things to increase the speed of serving requests like the use of a persistence profile.

The major drawback is it has lot of options nested inside, and each option has a lot of options. I'm not sure who might be using all those options or even some (limited) good options. They should pare everything down.

It requires a particular skill or training before being able to manage it. Creating virtual servers, managing pools, and nodes until it is working on WAF side of it becomes difficult while writing the irules.

Another drawback is we are using a physical appliance. It becomes very slow and unresponsive. Even logs cannot load on the box to troubleshoot. It overwrites the logs. They need to do something in log storage locally on this box in the next release.

BIG-IP LTM is mainly used to load balance applications.

BIG-IP LTM's most valuable feature is that it allows you to seamlessly add more servers without impacting your application's configuration. It's also very flexible because you can use iRules to manipulate the traffic.

I've been using BIG-IP LTM for over ten years.

BIG-IP LTM is quite stable - sometimes there are security vulnerabilities, but they inform us when a patch is needed. 

BIG-IP LTM is scalable - once F5 is installed, you can keep adding servers behind it.

BIG-IP LTM's technical support is good - once you log a case with them, the support is quite prompt and responsive.

Positive

The initial setup can be complex - it's quite flexible in terms of configuration, but the person configuring it needs to understand the application side, the network side, and the server. The speed of deployment depends on the application requirement and the application deployment cycle.

BIG-IP LTM is considered a premium product, so it's quite expensive and isn't affordable for all customers. F5's licensing is based on modules, so there are separate charges depending on which features you want.

Before implementing BIG-IP LTM, you should understand your expectations and requirements, especially from the application team. Putting BIG-IP LTM into a not-so-critical environment would be very expensive, so you may want to consider more medium-range solutions that can do the same job. I would give BIG-IP LTM a rating of ten out of ten.

It is a stable product from a stable company. Recently, they have been more focused on security as well.

Right now, there are a lot of products within F5's portfolio. They acquired a couple of companies like NGINX and Volterra. Some features and technologies overlapped when this acquisition occurred. They need to refine it and come up with a single, proper solution.
F5 should focus more on zero trust network access (ZTNA).They should be more focused on that framework because the industry is moving towards that. Everyone is talking about SASE and zero trust.

I've worked with this solution for about two years.

It's a stable product.

It is scalable.

In my experience, I have received excellent support from F5 for any technical issues that I or my customers have faced. I have had no issues with technical support.

The initial setup is easy.

The price is little bit on higher side, compared to the cost of NGINX.

If you are a partner, then I would recommend that you go through the partner portal videos because they have very good training videos that help you to learn the product and technology when it comes to implementation. It helps a lot with implementation, and they have detailed documentation that explains the implementation process step by step. Once you go through that, you'll definitely have a clear understanding of the implementation process. Without that, it may be a little bit tricky for you to complete the implementation in a smooth manner.

I would rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We use it for server management and application traffic, that is, to load balance between traffic for applications coming from their service. Users coming in are then able to have their traffic go to the service that has the suitable resources or adequate resources.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) improves the resilience and quality of the application itself, the speed and the user experience for the application. The data that the users need from the application is actually acquired faster. So, it provides faster data acquisition.

It also provides lower latency.

It would be good to have better traffic and better data. It would be nice to have more granularity to see packets in terms of the header details, the analytics, etc. It would be nice if that was also part of it and to have analytics added to the traffic.

I've been using it for two years.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is pretty stable. It's one of the most stable products that I know, when it comes to load balancing and traffic.

It is very scalable. We have thousands of users.

The technical support is top notch.

It is pretty easy to set up.

Because there were other parties involved, the deployment took us about a week. Normally, it takes a couple of hours.

We did it in-house.

I would advise you to go for it because it's one of the top three solutions in my opinion. I would rate it at seven on a scale from one to ten.