BIG-IP SCOM Management Pack - Monitoring you want

I’m currently working on F5 BIG-IP SCOM Management Pack. Comtrade, a company I work for, already has a BIG-IQ SCOM Management Pack, which was very well accepted by F5 product management and customers involved in Beta Program. Encouraged by that fact and market demand, we also decided to build a separate BIG-IP SCOM Management Pack. Early Access version will be released in the following weeks.

Let’s start this blog series by describing the main problems I’m tackling.

Purpose of BIG-IP device is to provide optimal access to applications (such as Microsoft Exchange, Lync and SharePoint), both from the user’s point of view and application host’s point of view.  So, we can say that the application is the king. Let’s make sure users can access these applications anytime!

F5 BIG-IP, as a device, can become unavailable, or start behaving unexpectedly. This can be due to a number of hardware related reasons: high CPU usage at some periods, no free storage, expired certificates, expired license and interfaces being down. In these cases, all application services configured on a specific BIG-IP may become unavailable, experience performance issues and have unexpected side-effects.

It is possible to configure BIG-IPs to send email notifications when certain events occur on the BIG-IP system, but it’s by no means trivial, as it is difficult to use this information for reporting and SLA dashboard purposes. It would be better (better as in less work to configure, check health and identify device having a problem and problem’s root cause) if when incident is about to happen (i.e. storage almost full, certificate due to expire, license due to expire, CPU working at high usage level for prolonged times), we can proactively, without specific per-device configuration, be warned about our applications that are in danger. This warning would, of course, come with enough information about the threat and this information would be collected to a single point.

There may be situations when a device becomes unavailable (i.e. stuck during reboot, disconnected from network etc.) and in those cases, in order to optimize your applications availability, it’s important to be aware of the issue, with all the relevant details as soon as possible.

If something might go wrong, we want to know that before it becomes an issue. How this sounds? Do you encounter these problems? What do you think about:

•  Monitoring BIG-IP device availability?
•  Making sure applications are working?
•  Navigating multiple devices in order to understand where application issues are?

Are there any other BIG-IP related problems that make your working day difficult?

To be honest with you, I will not cover all your needs with this first product release, therefore my true intention is to learn from you and help you address issues you are dealing with. So, if you want to discuss  your ideas that can be useful for managing BIG-IP problems or if you are willing to see product in action once it will be ready for a demo, please send me an email at milan.bundalo@comtrade.com or contact me using my Skype ID milan.bundalo.