F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

We are using this solution for the web application firewall and load balancing.

F5 has many capabilities for load balancing and web application firewall features.

There should be more logging improvements on F5. The logging features are too limited and do not give us a solid understanding of what's happening. For example, the web application firewall logs don't say complete, or why this is blocked, which signature or which root cause is blocking the log. 

Also, it can provide more understandable windows or dashboards regarding the latency of the application.

Citrix has cheap tools that show what is happening and describe why did they happen.

I would like to see improvements to the dashboard, latency reporting, and monitoring. Improvements in these areas would be very valuable.

I have been using F5 for approximately four years.

F5 is very stable. We have gone 300 days with no failures.

In regards to scalability, I have never experienced any bottlenecks of the hardware or the features of F5. F5 doesn't have any latencies.

With Citrix, at times we experience some latencies when the web application requires more complex directions, inspections, and more complex load balancing features.

The number of users is variant. Currently, we have more than 10,000 users.

I have not experienced any issues with technical support.

Citrix doesn't have as many options.

If you were to compare Citrix with F5, the pros of F5 is the idle features. It's very powerful and you can do tons of work with a few lines.

With Citrix, you have to learn and understand the regular expressions, but the regular expressions consume a lot of the hardware. Also, it is much more complicated.

F5 pricing is too high, compared to Citrix. 

If a big sector or a company needs more security and more control over applications and the ADC, F5 is the best choice. But if a company needs only an ADC, without the web application firewall features, Citrix is fine.

For those who are interested in this solution and you want more control over the applications then F5 is fine.

In the future, F5 will be our first choice, but everything can change.

What happens with the next features, we don't know. Maybe Citrix will overcome the problems and will become a more powerful tool than F5.

Without consideration of the price, I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.   

Our primary use case for this solution is as an alternative for ADT. We work with standard enterprise customers because this product is not affordable for the SME, it's not a cheap solution. We are partners with F5 and I'm a pre-sales and technical executive. 

The most valuable feature is the iRule.

The reporting could be improved and I'd also like to see the UI adjusted to make configuration easier. There are some things in the F5 configuration that are complicated. 

I've been using this solution for 16 years in total, continuously for the last seven years. 

I think this solution is very stable. 

This is a scalable solution. 

Compared to other solutions, the technical support is not very user friendly. 

I previously worked with Fortinet which is a much more reasonably priced solution. 

The initial setup is somewhat more complex than you would find in other solutions. Implementation can be completed in a couple of days but in terms of the configuration firewall of the product, for any application it will take a minimum of 15 days and up to a month.

If a company wants a good solution and has the money for it, I would recommend F5. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

Some of our clients use it as a load balancer. It can also be used as a web application firewall to protect your web-based applications from attacks.

The most valuable feature is the proxy. It is set up as a reverse proxy in front of the server. This feature allows me to do anything with the traffic, such as inspecting it. Most other solutions don't provide you with this capability.

This solution allows you to write scripts that can run on F5 devices. These scripts can be used to monitor traffic and look for keywords, and then perform a corresponding action such as blocking or allowing the request, or giving the user an error.

Big IP supports load balancing from network layer four up to layer seven.

More training should be available to customers. There is a guide that is available on the internet, but the training is not as good as others, such as Cisco. While F5 does have a big market share, it is not easy to find a well-training F5 engineer. If they made it easier for engineers to get F5 training then it would be better.

I have been working with F5 BIG-IP for five years.

This product is very stable. I have seen some instability with newly released versions, so I normally wait for a stable release before I upgrade an older one.

I have often been in touch with technical support and most of the time they are good. The response time is usually about one hour, although if it is a priority one issue then they will respond within 40 minutes at the maximum.

The initial setup is straightforward. If the analysis is already complete then it should only take five or ten minutes to deploy.

When you purchase the virtual edition or the hardware, it comes with the base license. There are additional costs depending on what modules or what functionality is required.

I consider F5 to be my network within my network because the traffic has to go through it. This includes things like the load balancer.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to learn and understand the architecture of the device. It will do very well for you if you understand it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We mainly use this solution for application delivery and application security - the product is used on a daily basis. We are partners of F5 and I'm the head of IT infrastructure. 

The application firewall is a very good feature. 

The policies management could be improved, that's why I'm doing a comparison of other solutions. This is also a very expensive solution. 

I'd like to see external loading included as part of the solution. 

I've been using this solution for seven years. 

The solution is stable overall. 

This solution is scalable. 

The technical support is very good. 

Deployment time depends on the size of the organization. In some places it takes a week or two; in others it can take three months. There is very little maintenance required but if necessary we do it ourselves. We do upgrades ourselves and maybe rely on technical support once a year. 

Everything is included in the license fee but it's a very expensive solution. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. If it were less expensive I'd rate it higher. 

We use it primarily for WAF.

The ability to quickly set up. I understood it very quickly. I had some URLs which pointed to my load balancers, and inside there, I had to send an action to the API Gateway. I thought it was going to be a very complex thing for me to do, but that one rule that I had to create, it solved everything for me.

The connection through the API Gateway worked in no time, which was fantastic. From the perspective of us building it, once you have that one rule you can stamp it out. Also, it was easy for me to show operations, "Look how easy it is. There's nothing complex about it." 

• iRules
• Simplicity

I was able to simply and quickly set up the WAF rules and security, and also set up easily complex policies and rules which gave me some great features to redirect. So, I had to integrate API Gateway into our WAF, because we're a healthcare company, and we have to maintain security. Therefore, they didn't want to have public endpoints that had not been inspected. The policy features inside the WAF rules were really easy for me to set up. What I thought was going to take me two months, I had done in about two weeks. Between Googling and F5 having great information, so instead of using traditional iRules, I used a policy thing that they recommended. It was much simpler and cleaner, and seemed to execute faster. It was a great feature.

The configuration and implementation of what I thought I was going to have to do was a lot simpler than I expected it to be. That was a plus.

People love them in security, but their costs are completely out of bounds. However, I'm not a security guy, so I don't necessarily know all the ins and outs of why our security team may have chosen this product versus other ones.

I am disappointed with the additional cost. 25 megabytes is low. If we get to a thousand, a gig, It is like three dollars an hour. While you can get a reduction in price, when I price them against anyone else, they are wildly overpriced.

I used GitHub for autoscaling CloudFormation, and I found two bugs and I submitted them. Their implementation in GitHub could be cleaner and allow for a bit more customization. We always end up customizing these things, so I found two bugs and I thought they were big bugs so I was surprised. This wasn't necessarily relative to product. It was more about the support role of GitHub and the way it was launching. However, the features that they said would work, did not.

It seems very stable. I've had no problems with stability at all. It's been rock solid, from the perspective of staying in line and working as expected.

I did individual testing. We were doing very small tests to start, 25 megabits. So, I was driving close to 25 megabits through it. Memory and CPU, I thought might be a bit of a concern, but overall it seemed good. It was doing what I needed it to do, and doing it well, so I didn't notice anything in my traffic.

I haven't thought of production workloads on it yet. I don't know how the performance is going to be in terms of CPU memory, but I was told by other people because of what we're doing on it, it could be hard to scale. So, we may have to end up buying more because we will be encrypting and decrypting. We have to inspect that traffic, so that will be CPU intensive. Therefore, one instance may not be enough for us, as we may be spinning up multiples across Multi-AZs.

We will be just stacking our costs. Granted, it is virtualization, and you can only get so much out of it. However, I haven't put true production workloads through it. I have only done my testing, and I am concerned a bit about these factors and how they may drive our costs even more, because I will have to spin up more WAFs to accommodate for high CPU and memory loads.

From a cost perspective, I agreed to analyze the standards in terms of load balancing. However, the cost that they have with AWS are almost prohibitive. I'm being forced to use F5 WAF. I would not simply use it based on cost. I agree that they have some great features, but for me, cost is key in terms of AWS. 

This applies to buying in the AWS Marketplace. If you go to a simple WAF doing 25 megabits, and I'm paying for the instance cost as well, it is over a dollar an hour. You can add that up and ask for some discounts, but relative to other players, they are significantly more expensive.

We will need a lot of these, and it can be a real negative driver in terms of spend and how we will be able to move forward.

Purchasing though the AWS Marketplace was easy; it was a piece of cake. You go right in, and the options are there. It was nice you can pick the different kind of group you wanted and what type of security you wanted. It did put in a lot of information that would build a lot of the initial infrastructure for me in terms of supporting my load balancer and creating security. Granted, I destroyed it all, but it was nice and it was there. It gave me the ability to level set what I should create versus what they put in place. I could see what they're doing here and I can match it to my own criteria. What they put in the AWS Marketplace and came through with the license, it worked well.

We chose to go through the AWS Marketplace because you can do almost anything you are going to launch there. The first time you launch, you always grab from the market, particularly for PoCs, as it's just easier. There's no reason why I wouldn't go through the AWS Marketplace, because they've already have F5 WAF. It's exactly what I want and it's exactly what I needed, so I can go from there.

I am a fan of using AWS natively. It is much cheaper.

We also looked at Check Point and Barracuda, but they were not markedly cheaper. The whole reason to use AWS was its ability to create resources which have more economic scale. This has almost started to get lost with the prices that these companies are charging.

I started my PoC back in April, which is when  I finished three PoCs across different deployments for F5. So, I'd probably been using the product for about eight months.

The product works.

We have F5 all across our environment. We use them for both VPNs and for traditional load balancers. So, we have VIPRIONs and several different versions of on-premise F5 hardware, as well. From an operations team perspective, everything is easy to learn; seamless. The ability to get teams to focus on AWS F5 is easy because they already know everything there. From an operational perspective, it is a win-win because they already know how to work with the F5.

Within our AWS environment, it is integrated with network load balancers. Then, depending on the traffic flow, it can either be back-end through the Palo Alto IDS IPS or it can be front-end for the IDS IPS. So, it has integration in between there, which was very nice. I was able to set up very intricate NAT rules, because I had to handle the traffic away. It did work very well. There were some issues with the routing, but that was more how AWS routes rather than F5 which I had to work around. Other than that, getting traffic back and forth between the two and the network load balancing was a piece of cake.

BIG-IP has multiple uses, including VPN, application firewall, and load balancing.

BIG-IP can do anything. It's like a Swiss Army knife. 

BIG-IP LTM is taking a long time to mature in cloud environments. They plan to improve cloud integration in the next version, but it isn't out yet. It's essential because more companies are moving to the cloud these days and using things like Kubernetes or microservices. F5 needs to improve in that direction, and they are. 

I have used BIG-IP for about 15 years

BIG-IP LTM's hardware is stable, and the operating system is great. 

BIG-IP can scale horizontally or vertically because it's a blade system.  If you need more hardware on the same appliance, you can put blades on it. They are a bit expensive but work fine. You can create a cluster if you want to scale horizontally and put any hardware you need on it. You can scale as much as you want.

I rate F5 support seven out of 10. The response time is okay, but sometimes you have to explain your issue to multiple support engineers before it gets resolved. It's a common issue with most tech support. 

Neutral

Setting up BIG-IP LTM was complicated in the beginning, but it has gotten easier over time. The deployment time varies depending on your environment. You have to connect and activate the license, but the operating system and modules are pre-installed. The basic setup takes only an hour, but you might need to do some additional configuration. 

BIG-IP LTM is somewhat pricey for a small company with a limited budget. 

We are using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for all the modules for DNS applications. It is a core product for us.

Since the COVID pandemic hit the whole company has been working remotely. It's improved the remote working by handling the security and the reachability of the company.

The most valuable features are DNS, APM, and ASM. Additionally, it is easy to use and you have a lot of flexibility to use the solution within a network.

The user interface could be improved in F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager.

There's can be some improvements done on the access policy manager(APM) such as supporting APIs and web services.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for approximately eight years.

I have found F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to be stable.

The scalability of the solution is good.

We have approximately 20 engineers using the solution.

The solution is extensively being used and we plan to increase usage.

We use many other solutions in our company.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We did the implementation of the solution in-house.

We have one engineer that handles the support of the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager.

We have seen an ROI by using this solution.

We are on an annual license to use the solution.

We have evaluated other solutions but we found the scalability and usability to be better in F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager.

I strongly recommend this solution.

I rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager a nine out of ten.

We are using it for internal traffic management and traffic load balancing. Its version is up to date.

Its user interface is very easy to use on a day-to-day basis. It is very user-friendly.

My only point of contention would be that it is a little pricey.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

Its stability has been great. I haven't had any issues with it in terms of downtime.

It is scalable, especially in the cloud. On-prem, it may need additional licensing or an additional appliance. That depends on how large and what the use case is specifically for the customer.

I'd evaluate their tech support as a five out of five. They are very knowledgeable. They have the answers, and if they don't, they're able to escalate and point us to the correct people or provide the correct literature.

Positive

I was not a part of the initial deployment or rollout. There are three people who are managing it and deploying it. They are system admins.

It is a little pricey. I wish the pricing was cheaper, but I wish the pricing was cheaper for everything.

Make sure that you know how much traffic you're going to have coming through because that can affect whether you need a big box or a small box.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.