F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) Reviews

We primarily use the solution to protect and to divide cells. We are not using AFM as a standalone product. We are using AFM with the LTM module, as a module. The main purpose of F5 is to use it as an ADC application to deal with the console.

The DDoS is the solution's most valuable feature.

The support that the product offers is good. 

When you buy an F5 as an appliance, you are buying licenses as well. If you buy both LTM and AFM licenses, you can protect your servers in a one-off solution. You don't have to buy another firewall to protect your servers. It makes security really easy.

The decryption is great.

We aren't using the most recent version. The most recent version is 15. Therefore, there may have been improvements on the solution we're not aware of.

The should add, if they aren't already going to, some features surrounding location awareness, station awareness and segregation of users. I'm not sure of which version supports these items and which port version doesn't. However, I hope they will continue to develop out the product to ensure they are included.

In order to overcome some of the problems in the industry, I would like to see the solution offer a hardware device with strong ASICs, and a stand-alone AFM tool to prevent attacks. 

I've been using the solution for two years or so now.

The solution is pretty stable. If you do happen to find a bug, they will provide you with a patch to solve the issue. You can also go to their website where they will list all of the bugs that are associated with each version. They make it quite transparent.

The solution is scalable because it doesn't depend on hardware. If you run this product on a Viprion, it will be scalable, but not too much. If you run the same product with the same version in a standalone device or on a virtual system, you will use the power and scale of the associated device. It's scalable because you are able to use the same product in different hardware. If you buy a powerful server, and you can scale your F5 as a virtual system easily.

I don't really reach out to technical support, so I wouldn't be able to assess it.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not complex. It just takes a few steps and you are finished.

Deployment times vary according to the customer. It needs to be heavily configured. You need to look and you need to observe the behavior of the traffic before you can start configuring everything. It can take time.

In terms of deployment, a powerful deployment actually needs a minimum of two people and one of them needs to speak with the developers because the developers are protecting the source. They will help you to understand the requirements. After the assessment of the requirements, the users can deploy and test the solution.

Maintenence also varies by customer, however, once it is configured, unless you are adding extra servers or adjusting things, there doesn't need to be any maintenance. You can just leave it alone for the most part, so you will only need one person to check on it.

I help my clients deploy the product to their systems.

While some companies have now started to move these devices from on-premises to the cloud, most companies prefer not to do this due to security reasons.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a good product, but it may not be the absolute best on the market. Companies should examine NGINX or Palo Alto or others and compare them to see what would work best for their organization.

I would recommend the solution.

It's great for protecting servers from attacks. With controllers plus the firewall, you will only need one device to protect everything.

I use F5 AFM (Advanced Firewall Manager) for several solutions including firewall, load balancing, and security.

The F5 product has one thing that is remarkable. I do not have any two deployments for customers that are exactly the same. There are so many opportunities to configure the product to the client's exact needs that it offers unprecedented flexibility.

I would have to say that F5 excels in all aspects of network protection. There are five modules and I have yet to use them all. I use the LTM that's Local Traffic Manager, then I've worked with APM or Access Policy Manager, and I've worked with AFM which is Advanced Firewall Manager.

 If I were a CPO of an organization, I would just get F5 in my infrastructure to perform all the network security activities. I could just do that if I have the budget rather than bringing in separate solutions like Barracuda from one vendor and then bringing one other solution from another vendor. This is a unified solution that is already integrated and optimizes performance.

F5 will do load balancing, security, act as the firewall and F5 excels in executing all of them. How it gets deployed depends on the customer and on what particular features the customers want. From a deployment perspective, F5 is excellent in all of them.

I've had a very impressive four-year experience deploying F5, so it is difficult to pinpoint one weakness in the solution. On the other hand, honestly in all of the deployments I have done with F5, there has not been one customer that has used up to 40% capacity of what the modules can provide. That's a case of underutilization. If anything, the product is already more powerful than any client I know has needed. It would be difficult for them to improve in this particular area.

I can vouch for the stability of F5. The product has been around for a while now. In fact, there is a particular claim that they use in their marketing and we have experienced. We have had some customers where we find that in the environment they have very old, end of life cycle, machines that are still running their F5 instance. 

Even though the product is 'end of life' F5 company is very committed to supporting it. So the improvements keep coming out. It is technically not 'end of life' because they still support it. We have not had any customer that complained that "Oh they are billing me for the F5 system because of one upgrade." It's very, very stable, it's reliable once it is deployed. It's just there once it is deployed and there is nothing to worry about.

F5 is also highly scalable. You can easily upgrade from one version to the next or even upgrade the machine. The hardware is scalable. We can and have easily upgraded a deployment either by turning on or applying a license. As for the machine, you can upgrade the physical hardware or you can use a virtual machine because they have a Virtual Machine Edition. The scalability is versatile and straightforward.

I find the technical support to be top-notch. I rarely have to contact technical support. The only time I do is if I think I don't have time to do research on my own by taking the time to look things up by reading community posts. If I can just quickly contact technical support, sometimes it makes more sense. Whenever I have contacted technical support, they call back within the hour. It also depends on the severity of the issue that you're reporting. When you submit a ticket, you have severity level 1, 2, 3, 4. So, the response time depends but whatever the case is. But the technical support are always responsive. They call you and they stay with you till the situation is resolved.

There was only one case I reported that they did not resolve immediately. The engineer could not find a solution to the issue. They had to do something to actually change the OS. They have a special way to address this kind of problem. They call it the engineering hot seat. That engineering hot seat solution had to come out as an update in the next version. So, that's how professional and resourceful technical support is. They're fantastic.

The product is easy to install. It's straightforward. In fact, the first time I deployed F5, it was my very first experience doing an installation of the product. It was my very first experience using F5 and I deployed it for an Enterprise customer and it was successful. That was my first time using it and it was successful. If you follow the guidelines that they give you, it says "do this, do that," and it is very very easy. 

There have been applications that I have installed with terrible navigation. You can't move from point A to point B, C, and D. Or by the time you get to D you can't get back to A. F5 just works. It is easy to navigate and install.

We deploy this product ourselves for clients, and as I mentioned it is easy to do even for the first time.

The product is a little expensive but it is such a good solution and unified that the cost is worth the price.

We have evaluated and also recommend other solutions when the client does not have the budget to go with F5. For example, we used some Cisco solutions which are also expensive but they are not as versatile and easy to deploy and manage.

I have not had any deployments that are exactly the same. For example, if I deployed everything as a solution for customer A and for customer B I do deployments with the same set of applications, and even then there are differences in the deployment. In all the experiences I have had, they have never been the same in my entire four-year experience installing the product. That shows how broad F5 is in its ability to manage situations and customize the experience for specific organizations.

It is usually the case that customers tell us what they want to achieve. They tell us what the need is in their network or in their infrastructure, or they tell us the solution that they expect as a result and then we make a recommendation. If we make the recommendation and they are impressed with the capabilities that the solution can achieve, then they go for it if they have the budget. If they do not have the budget or they don't like what we propose we can give them a different plan.

In most cases, our customers have taken the time and have done their research very well. They just say, "okay, we need this product or solution and I want this product deployed." In most cases, we don't even get to do a recommendation because they have done their research. They have come to a conclusion as to what product meets their needs whether it is because of the name or the advertising. In my opinion, it may not always be the best solution, but they are the client so we give them what they ask for.

The dashboard and the interface for F5 are fantastic. That is really something that is remarkable. It is unlike any other solutions that I've worked with. For example with Cisco, many of the things that you want to do you have to take care of on the command line. It is not very convenient. With F5 you find everything in the interface. There is hardly anything that you want to do with F5 that you can't do from the GUI.

In terms of analytic reporting, the product has very good detailed analytics that comes with the product that you can access on the dashboard. There is also analytics and analysis with visibility reporting. The module that is dedicated for that gives you a fine grain access into everything that you want to see and report on immediately. With everything I want to do for the client in F5, the GUI allows me and maybe this makes a big difference for me in the evaluation of the product because of its ease of use. The dashboard is fantastic and the GUI is excellent.

What I find most impressive about F5 is that, as long as you know what you want to do, as long as we know what you want to achieve, you find the solution there. Let me restrict this example to the LTM (local traffic manager). Let's say, for instance, you want to deploy your application and then there is a feature you want to add or you want to introduce some kind of logic you want to introduce that you cannot find in GUI or it doesn't even come packaged with the box. If you have an idea of what you want to do, you can program it in.

There is a feature you can use to introduce some programmability into the box. It really just comes down to you knowing what exactly you want to achieve. If it doesn't come already pre-programmed as part of the package, this feature will allow you to program it in yourself. There is hardly anything you would want to do that F5 cannot do for you.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and ten being the best, I would rate this product as a nine. The only reason I will not give them a ten is because of the cost. But based on functionality and ease of deployment, scalability, reliability, overall security and functionality, I give them nine. 

We use three main features. The first one is access control. Access control would mainly use the IP geolocation feature. This feature in AFM lets you limit access to some countries and allow other countries. Some countries can access your service while others cannot access it. This is one feature which is called IP geolocation. 

The second feature we use is called IP intelligence. It's another feature of F5. It's like a straight feed for all blacklisted IP addresses in the world. They make categories for the blacklisted IP addresses, such as blacklists to a channel, blacklisted proxies, blacklisted malicious malware, and blacklisted spammers. If anyone of these IPs is trying to hurt your service, we are able to just block it with the AFM firewall, which is a separate license in essence. We utilize this license as well. 

Finally, we have a DDoS safety feature. AFM provides protection for the network from a DDoS attack. We use this feature at times too. These are the only three features we utilize: IP geolocation, IP intelligence, and DDoS.

Firstly, geolocation currently relies on manual updates. It has to move to automatic updates. There are no automatic updates for this feature. If some IPs, countries, or service providers move to another country, now we will allow IPs that were previously denied. This is because you depend on the database, which doesn't update automatically. This is really a very important area that they need to improve.

I also want to see something like application inspection. If they can add application inspection like a DC firewall, it would be a good added feature for them.

We've been using this solution for four years now.

I would say it's a good, stable solution. We haven't had a major issue with the AFM.

They have many options to scale. They have a very stable, versatile FM, but we rely on the physical units. I can see that it's very scalable. Whatever you want to add, you can add to the same cluster.

Sometimes technical support is good and sometimes they are bad, so I can evaluate them around 80%.

It's a good solution only for a published service. If you are publishing services outside the company, it's very good for us, but the biggest lesson is that it cannot be applied internally to replace a data center firewall. Sometimes, a company will introduce F5 to the place as a data center firewall. It's not a replacement for the DC firewall. It cannot replace the data center firewall but can be added to the service.

I would rate this as eight out of ten.

The solution is primarily used as a web application firewall.

The solution is very straightforward. The usability is great.

The pricing of the solution could be a little bit better.

We've been selling the solution for five years now.

The solution is very stable. We haven't run into bugs, crashes or glitches. We find it reliable.

The solution is very scalable. Companies should not face issues when they need to expand. 

We have 20 enterprises using the solution currently. They are mostly banks.

We've been in touch with technical support in the past and have been very satisfied so far with their level of support.

We aren't currently offering any other solutions similar to F5.

The initial setup is straightforward. We didn't run into complexities when setting it up.

We are a reseller of F5. We're not a customer.

I'd advise companies considering implementing the solution to understand the architecture and the flow of the service before setting it up.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We are using this solution for protection and blocking IPs for our customers.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that the blocking of IPs.

F5 has many advantages.

Currently, we have eighty F5s and we need some kind of management software. It would be very helpful. 

In the next release, I would like to have management and monitoring software included.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It's very stable.

It's not as easy to scale because you have to purchase new hardware to scale up.

I am satisfied with technical support, they are fairly widespread.

The initial setup was complex.

Some of the rules were not easy to do and it can take a fair amount of time to deploy.

I am doing the maintenance of this solution.

It's very expensive, and you pay extra for the models.

I recommend this solution to others who are interested in using F5 Advanced Firewall.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.