F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Room for Improvement
There is a need for a more modular version to concentrate on the current monolithic structure of both the virtual and hardware versions. The existing code, which dates back almost two decades is being evaluated and there are plans formulated for the new modular version. However, I believe that the transition to a new modular, design should make the application more agile, lighter, and conducive.
LTM's cloud capabilities could be improved. Cloud providers all offer load balancing, but you can't get the same level of security. F5's cloud service is still not on par with its on-prem service.
F5 acquired multiple companies a few years ago, but they still haven't integrated those solutions. For example, F5 acquired Shape Security, which had an excellent solution for detecting bots and automated login attacks, but F5 offers the solution in an inflexible way.
It is only available as a cloud-based solution. It isn't zone-based. Some companies are restricted from sending financial data outside the country because of GDPR in Europe or other national regulations. Here in the UAE, we can't send host data out.
View full review »SE
reviewer2129115
Senior Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
The pricing model has caused some frustration. My clients implemented the solution and later wanted to upgrade the features but the pricing structure was complicated. There are other solutions with better pricing models.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.
RP
reviewer1250289
Sr. Architect at a media company with 10,001+ employees
I would like to see tighter integration with all the product lines. A more hybrid approach would be beneficial for users.
It would also be great if the solution was less expensive.
View full review »JO
reviewer1706595
Senior Network Engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
Its GUI could be a bit better. Other than that, it's already pretty good. We don't use it in a high-performance environment. So, we don't really care so much about too many features.
View full review »AC
reviewer1739430
Senior Technical Consultant at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
For right now, I don't have anything I would suggest in terms of improvements.
I worked mainly on the CLI. Working on the CLI on the operations level or on the configuration level is sometimes a bit complex to understand. You have to have a good background in Linux so that you can perform the necessary solutioning or operations through the CLI. Whenever we want to investigate something we need to use the CLI, however, the CLI level troubleshooting and the solutioning, it is a little bit complicated. We have a limitation when it comes to the GUI. That said, I have found that we can do much better analysis with troubleshooting over the CLI.
Scaling up is complex.
It's expensive.
We need to have good security features available. It's something I still need to explore more, however.
View full review »OD
Orphé DJEDJERO
Design and Conception Engineer at SFR
There are some aspects of F5 BIG-IP that could be improved, the main one being virtual machine support. We have seen that even with the virtual editions, there are some things that we would like to do that are currently not possible with virtual machines.
We have seen some problems mainly with F5 BIG-IP ASM, and so I think the virtual editions of the ASM could be improved.
Another negative aspect is the cost, as it can be expensive.
RJ
Rakesh Joshi
General Manager at Seriti Resources
In terms of pricing, it could be more competitive.
View full review »There is room for improvement in terms of stability. The F5 BIG-IP LTM allows multiple virtual machines to run on a single appliance. However, if one of those virtual portions fails, it can cause issues and impact the overall stability of the solution.
View full review »The area for improvement would be analytical capabilities and configurations in LTM. For example, I want to know the end-to-end processes. If the traffic comes to the virtual servers without taking a wide shot, I would like to see the reason for the latency. The analytics should provide insight into latency across various traffic routes and virtual servers. The additional features in the next release should be real-time analytical capabilities.
View full review »JS
Joel Soares De Jesus
Operator at Capgemini Engineering
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is expensive. Pricing needs to be improved.
View full review »KS
Kuber Shukla
Senior Security Specialist at Tech Mahindra Limited
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.
View full review »KV
reviewer1897710
Principle Architect (retired recently) at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is sometimes a bit cumbersome to deal with some builds, although that's gotten significantly better over the years.
There is also room for improvement in the integration between security set features that were available on their security tools to work more seamlessly with some of their load balancing functionality. It works well, but I would personally think they could improve it.
Simplifying the user interface would be nice to see as well.
View full review »F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager could improve by having an FNI feature for a single source to multi-domain load balancing.
When I was using the solution I was using the basic functions and I found it difficult to handle some of the more advanced features. I needed assistance from my IT department or the vendors themself. There should be more workshops are places to gain knowledge on how to use the solution. You need specific skill sets to use it.
View full review »MI
Mohamed Intissar
Tax Department at a government with 10,001+ employees
An area for improvement in F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is troubleshooting on the command line, which should be more graphical.
Another area for improvement is that it's a high-priced product.
What I want to see in the product's next release is more analytics.
View full review »MD
reviewer1589751
Senior Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
In terms of what could be improved, I would expect more integration with different platforms and more integration with the backend systems.
Additionally, in the next release, I would like a more secure version.
TH
Thomas Hejula
Senior IT Engineer at Lumeris
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.
The pricing must be more flexible. We get billed for firewalls based on the usage. It will be helpful if the solution provides such flexibility.
View full review »KO
reviewer1573344
Network Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
So far, everything appears to be fine. I wouldn't be the best person to comment on something like APIs because I haven't really dug into a lot of APIs. However, I believe F5 falls a little short when it comes to APIs. But I'm not certain.
View full review »EF
Eric Foote
Managing Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
I would like them to expand load balancing, being able to go across multiple regions to on-premise and into the cloud. This could use improvement, as it is sometimes a little cumbersome.
Based on my experience using F5 and by only taking into consideration the last seven years, I have found that the reporting mechanism is bad. F5 seems to prioritize its core functions and has not placed a strong emphasis on logging and reporting. I say that the reporting is bad based on my experiences and after considering the requests from customers over the past 11 years. They often ask for specific reports and information that are not available from the devices.
I want the response from tech support to get faster.
View full review »The GUI needs improvement. They need some sort of help section in the GUI, like descriptions of certain features. There are a lot of features, and it is hard to remember what does what. Having some sort of prompt or pop-up in the GUI would help a lot.
The pricing could always be better. It's a bit expensive.
It would be ideal if they offered integration with NGINX. They purchased NGINX as well. Therefore, if it's got integration with NGINX, then you kind of have one single pane of a console for all the F5/NGINX portions of your work.
View full review »The solution's hardware quality needs improvement. Also, its cloud-based anti-DDoS has limitations. It could be better.
View full review »F5 is a bit expensive in comparison. Moreover, there is room for improvement in the user interface. It can be more user-friendly.
View full review »Kemp Loadmaster is cheaper compared to F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). Also, the solution's UI needs improvement.
View full review »F5 BIG-IP LTM can improve on the SSL loading which includes the authentication of certificates. Although, most of these issues have been solved there are still some issue that persists.
In a feature release, it would be helpful to have real-time packet features in the GUI.
View full review »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.
View full review »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.
View full review »In terms of native integrations, there is a lot of instability. Also, integration is not robust with F5.
We need a very large team to manage the solution. Had it been cloud native, it would have been very seamless, but because it's not cloud native, it does not integrate really well.
View full review »OD
Oren Dror
Security IT Manager at IFAT Group
The pricing of the product is a bit too high. They should work to make it more affordable. It needs to be more cost-efficient.
View full review »BE
Bachir Elsitt
Network Security Engineer at Data Consult
F5 should improve or develop the reporting tools further.
They should improve the management policies on the BOX.
YA
Yudi Aritonang
Co-Founder and CEO at PT Eugenea Kreasi Utama
The deployment could be simplified. From a technical perspective, it is complex.
The pricing could be reduced.
MA
reviewer1721355
Security Technical Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
One area for improvement with F5 BIG-IP LTM could be its pricing, which some may find on the higher side. Lowering costs could make the solution more accessible to a wider range of organizations.
The user interface of F5 BIG-IP LTM is old and could improve.
View full review »PM
Priyesh MP
Solution Architect at Softcell Technologies Limited
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.
SA
Satish Agarwal
Lead Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
I'm not very sure about the security with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). We have our own private data center, but we are going to migrate our private data center into the Azure cloud environment. Security will then be a major concern when we migrate our own whole infrastructure to the public cloud.
So, I think they should improve in terms of security because nowadays, most organizations try to build their infrastructure on public cloud.
More documentation should be uploaded because very limited documentation is available on the internet. It will also help us to understand the system before purchasing the product.
View full review »AR
reviewer1552263
Sr. SAP Portfolio Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
It is a hardware load balancer, and its installation procedure is more complex than a software load balancer. There are pros and cons of using hardware load balancing. You have to have specific hardware deployed in your data center to activate this load balancer. They never came up with any software-based load balancing solution. It is all hardware-based.
View full review »RS
Robert Smith
DevOps Manager at TaxACT
The management process seems a bit difficult.
The management interface is unclear, complex, and not concise. I would like a better user interface.
For integration with other AWS environments, we do some tie-ins with some autoscaling groups. This has been challenging for us. We have had issues, where when autoscaling groups scale up, there are some instances which are not showing up in the proper size. Then, those IPs would get registered with F5, but never get released. Therefore, we are ending up with a whole bunch of ghosted IPs. However, this is more an implementation detail than an F5 detail.
View full review »The ASM administration is quite complex. I am a technical GUI expert (not UI). They did improve the ASM administration in each version, but added new features, too. The topic itself is pretty complex, so it is not easy to provide a nice, clean interface. There are a lot of references and dependencies in-between the different subareas.
View full review »WM
Walid Mouamar
Network and Security Engineer at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The price for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is very high. This aspect could be improved.
View full review »LM
reviewer1505658
Sr. Network Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
The solution could improve the documentation.
View full review »MS
reviewer1433067
Director of Network Strategies and Technologies at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would like to see some better documentation focused on our website and better search criteria. That's probably the best way to say that there needs to help with research.
The cost of the solution is pretty high. It would be ideal if it was more reasonable.
View full review »GJ
Guojun Jin
Staff Engineer at UbiNavi
Performance is the first thing and most critical issue that needs improvement.
Supporting more Clients would be nice, but without improving performance, F5 will not widely be used for critical work. It killed an international meeting the first time that we used BIG-IP VPN.
View full review »SP
SagarPatel
Senior ICT Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
All the cyber security vendors and their products need improvement, including F5 and this product. No one is 100% secured, because attacks are more sophisticated now, and the hackers have become more advanced.
Recently, I've seen one of the attacks on this particular network, where they managed to bypass its multi-factor authentication. They were able to bypass that level of security, and they managed to get into the network.
Every cyber security vendor needs to be proactive. No one is perfect, so even the rank one cyber security vendors should also keep their eyes open all the time.
It would also be better if F5 provided free product training for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), so end customers could have more awareness and understanding of the product, so they'll know how to use it.
Our level of requirements, usage, and scalability are being met by this product. If we needed additional features, or if we needed additional licenses, all we need to do is just buy the additional features or licenses, so we currently don't have any additional features we'd like to be included in the next version of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM).
View full review »OK
OMKaewsaenchai
Total Solution System Engineer at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
F5 could improve the rule-setting capabilities in the GUI, and they need to simplify web management. For example, the menus in the Citrix GUI are easier to navigate, with a clean structure and layout. It helps you navigate and find what you're looking for, but some of the menus in the F5 GUI are not very intuitive. You're doing the same task, but sometimes it's on the left, sometimes on the right, etc. It should all be on the same setup group menu or something like that.
View full review »KO
reviewer1573344
Network Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Technical support is somewhat slow and could be improved.
View full review »The solution could improve the ease of use, the management could be simplified. Other solutions are easier to use.
View full review »ST
reviewer1633455
Director at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
A lot of functions that are attributed to iRules can actually be simple profile changes. iRules do have a certain performance impact. Therefore, instead of writing simple iRules, they can create certain profiles for classes that will perform the same function.
Its scalability and pricing can also be improved.
View full review »SS
ShivSingh
Sr. Advisor at CVS Health
Services to be improved:
- Multi-cloud consistency, like to simplify administration with centralized policies with multi-cloud vendors
- F5 lateral scalability within the container is still restricted.
- Web application firewalls and service mesh would be a nice-to-have feature.
- Drive programmable application with 100% restful API
- Cover deployment
- Monitoring
- Policy-based control.
In future, I would like there to be more device security. I would like the tool to support SSL links, along with SSL and TLS. It also needs to disable the old cipher suite, which is a very old. There are ciphers, like D5, still available on the device.
View full review »BIG-IP LTM's sandboxing integration could be improved.
View full review »To improve the product, they could add more load balancing solutions in Kubernetes.
View full review »Its scalability and deployment should be better. It should be more scalable, and it should be easier to deploy.
View full review »I think the product is a good product. I think where they can improve is in the licensing. It's quite expensive. They could make it more aligned with the business model than with the hardware.
View full review »EZ
Network8776
Network Presales Manager at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
The products are great and easy to upgrade from time to time to improve functionality. F5 BIG-IP is working fine. We use it more in production and operations.
There are issues with F5 BIG-IP but they are minor issues, not big ones. This does not affect production and services.
Sometimes the operations and the facility systems fail. However, there is an alert action from the windows.
Related to the groups, when it comes to cost, rates are regulated. When the market is not good, then we will consider doing the increase.
In general, there are more features that could be provided with F5 BIG-IP if it were not so costly.
From application to application to customer respects, you can't always customize software based on customer requirements. If you don't consider that, you can't deliver.
FM
Flight9875
Works at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would like to see improvement in the manageability and easier setup.
They need to have features that you can turn on and spin up and not have to buy a license for. I'd want to be able to quickly spin up a feature and start using it and then come back and pay for it later. Citrix has them beat on that.
View full review »JW
ChiefSecd99d
Chief Security Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
We would like to have integration into encryption and PKI integration with SafeNet. That is probably the key component in using External PKIs, letting people bring their PKIs with them. On the back-end, we have a SafeNet component. They are going to bring additional features in, so allowing integration with encryption and PKI, and tying it back into Microsoft AD in the back with an LDAP lookup for users.
View full review »GS
Georges Samaha
Security Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
- Reporting: One of the negative things about F5 is there is no place to generate a summary/executive/detailed report about everything happening on the box, especially for WAF & APM events. The only way to get some kind of report is enable the AVR module, and manually export the data required into PDF/XLS documents.
- GUI interface: F5 appliances lack a standard dashboard page, where it shows a summary for all events on the boxes. (This is usually available with firewalls & IPSs...) In the F5 GUI, we have to perform multiple steps to reach the required info, but there is no simple (and attractive) GUI interface when compared to some other WAF competitors.
- Event notifications
I would like F5 to incorporate the ability to create your own custom roles and customised permissions within the product set. I have seen many customers wanting to give a certain level of access for the purposes of out-of-hours servicing to out-of-hours staff or teams that fulfill an operations type role.
For example, I would like to see the ability to create roles within F5 where I can specify permissions instead of choosing from a set list that does not always fit my organisation’s needs. The current roles available out-of-the-box do not allow for enough granularity for an operator role to take pool resources offline and push or commit those changes to the configuration/HA cluster. Every role within the F5 that can make changes should be able to commit those changes if the administrator(s) permits.
View full review »The UI could be improved and we also find the pricing to be quite high.
View full review »MO
reviewer1788060
Senior Network and Security Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
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.
View full review »There are not very many areas for improvement, but the price is high.
View full review »SM
reviewer1277325
Specialist in Communication and Network Security at a security firm with 11-50 employees
F5 has another solution to load balance servers on the cloud, which they got after the purchase of NGINX. It is deployed as Kubernetes or something like that, but the problem now is that they have two solutions for two situations. They should make F5 deployable on the cloud.
Recently, we were investigating offloading SSL as version TLS 1.3. I am not sure if we were able to do that or not.
UP
reviewer1448481
Network Security Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 5,001-10,000 employees
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.
View full review »PK
Solutiond87c
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
They could improve the product's ease of use. There has been a bit of complication on some things from the admin side. There is some confusion how to operate it.
View full review »I have been really happy with what they have been doing.
They could improve the synchronization between their main site and the failover site. Sometimes, we run into issues where it does not sync well, so I would like to see that improved.
The synchronization does works fairly well. However, if I were to make changes, I would make it easier to start the sync process. For example, once you get the changes pending you have to click inside to tell it to sync. It would be nice if it would offer a button to click on for the sync if it is only going one direction. Another feature which would be nice in a sync is to have the ability to compare if there are changes on both sides, and if there are conflicts, it would allow you to choose which to apply. Otherwise, it would sync both directions at the same time.
LF
ipmplspr538920
Security Governance at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would recommend that the cost be lowered.
User tracking: Needs to provide a visual interface to follow a customer's activity (from client to BIG-IP to SNAT IP to the chosen server, then back). Today, we are still performing packet captures.
RM
Rana Mohamed
Product Manager at MCS
The user experience for dashboards and reports can be improved. They should make dashboards and the reporting system easier for users. They need to add more reports to the dashboard. Currently, for complicated reports, I have to do the customization.
It should have more integration with network firewalls to be able to gather all the information required for traffic management.
View full review »PK
PradeepKumar11
IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We are currently using BIG-IP and NetScaler and we wanted to have just one technology. We will be replacing F5 in March.
NetScaler is primarily used for Citrix purposes and BIG-IP is being used as a reverse proxy for our other applications. We would like to manage it easily with one technology.
I would like to see better integration. I can remember when we were implementing ADFS, we had some challenges.
There is not a lot of documentation available where you can refer to and configure any new technologies.
View full review »This solution could be improved by reducing the cost. It's the main reason that we're considering another option for our website even though we're very satisfied with the way the Big-IP works and the way Big-IP protects our environment, but it's very expensive. We are keen to find out if there is a similar system for technology that would suit us and cost less.
I would like to see F-5 implement a regular routing like in other Linux-based devices. We know the F-5 is not a router, but can be used for traffic forwarding, so it's not the same as other devices if we compare it with Citrix-based devices. It is a simple Linux-based routing software. I don't have any problems with it. However, in F-5, when we try and integrate in some complex networks, we have to use some additional routing scenarios from a Layer 3 perspective, then we have some problems. It would be great if this were fixed somehow.
We have to keep in mind features when we deploy an F-5 solution. Designing the same approach in Citrix can often be simpler. I have written syntax in F-5 which were complicated; not straightforward. For example, in a Citrix device, we have a lot of predefined patterns, and it's much simpler to implement.
View full review »MK
reviewer1465533
Channel Development Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I'd like to see a more intuitive interface. The market now is moving into salvage services, different kinds of services, not only hardware solutions.
TA
Thameem Ansari
Senior solution architect at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
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.
JC
Joshua Cruz
Associate Systems Engineer at Frontline Education
The auto logout feature after three minutes is terrible. I wish they would make that longer, since it is not a feature that we can change.
View full review »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.
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.
CS
reviewer1352181
Associate CSA at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
My only point of contention would be that it is a little pricey.
View full review »JU
Jonathan Urrea
Security Professional Services at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
When you create an autofile, its profile takes a long time to generate the view in the VIP. That is probably due to the performance of the device, however, when you load a specific profile, the browser takes more than one minute to show the information.
The web interface could be better.
The solution should allow for the creation of custom signatures. Right now, I see that can be a little bit complicated to create new or personal signatures in the VIP.
The way that policies are created should make it easier to maintain the solution.
The product needs to implement some kind of artificial intelligence or machine learning that can start to generate fewer false positive requests. We tend to have a lot of false positives. The policy should be created in such a way as to help lower false positives.
There should be better reporting. Our customers ask us for reports quite often. It would be ideal if the solution itself was able to generate various types of reports for them instead.
The license terms for "non-commercial" are challenging for us.
View full review »GV
Girish Vyas
Architect - Cloud Serviced at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
The only area that has room for improvement would be pricing.
Other than that, the v11 clustering is a new technology they have brought in that does not require improvement. They are the leader in the space.
View full review »
LTM – the product is fine and all features that I have deployed have proven to be stable. TMOS release schedule is very dynamic. Major releases (9-10, 10-11) could have been made easier if configuration migration assistants had been more finessed prior to release.
View full review »
KN
reviewer1483797
Service Delivery Engineer - Network Security Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Its price can be better. It is a bit expensive.
View full review »RG
technica696483
Technical Product Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The room for improvement is that the product is a little costly. I live in the Third World, Pakistan. We have budget constraints, even in big enterprise servers. My team said that this product is too costly, and why don't we go with another product, we should do a comparative analysis with Citrix and F5.
I told them that is costly, but it has rich features, the support is good, the features are reliable, and the technical assistance center, the tech support, is almost perfect.
Still, I would say they need to cut their prices for countries or regions that we live in.
The one gap I saw was that pure LBN integration is a little tricky. The insertion of F5 in LBN is a little tricky. They need to work on something, on products by which they can insert F5 in any sort of cloud environment. These are not really big things.
They are continuously improving. They are improving day by day, and they are the number-one load balancer.
TB
reviewer1429230
Solutions Architect - Telecom & Network Infrastructure at a non-tech company with 501-1,000 employees
We use a limited amount of features so the biggest issue for us is the price. For what we're using, it's an expensive solution.
Logging is a bit of a problem. Logging and monitoring are only in plain text. You have to search and you have to know what you are searching for to find anything. So of course, monitoring and getting alerts for abnormal situations is hard. There are no tools for monitoring and alerts. If you have problems and you need to diagnose them, you really have to know what you're looking for in order to find it.
Logging and monitoring could be something out-of-the-box that are more accessible.
View full review »JC
JackChen3
Works at FiSC
Internet and cloud support could be improved. Security enhancement should be more user friendly.
The SharePoint SSO part has some room for improvement. Opening documents and spreadsheets on local applications in on our specific situation is not possible.
View full review »MM
reviewer1527075
Lead Network Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Technical support could be improved.
View full review »SR
Sanja Rakic
Security Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
I can't say that there are any features missing. I've overall been quite happy with it.
We once had an issue related to trying to publish some exchange application to a file and we experienced some problems there, however, the incident was not really related to BIG-IP. It was likely some kind of infrastructure problem the company was experiencing.
We haven't had any big problems of note.
Technical support could be faster. It's something I'd like to see them work on in the future.
The pricing could be more reasonable.
View full review »SP
SaurabhPal
Technical Specialist - Network & Security at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Currently, the product offers everything we need. I can't recall any features that may be lacking.
View full review »Fixing bugs.
View full review »Active-Standby sync has to be made automatic.
All of the F5 boxes have an Active-Standby configuration. Users need to make changes in the Active box, but often users by mistake make changes in the Standby box. This creates problems when syncing between Active and Standby. There should be some indication from the F5 tool to avoid such mistakes.
View full review »SG
Reviewer702843
Director Technology Solutions with 11-50 employees
Implementing whitepapers with a lot more applications could easily be added.
This project is missing some relevant features:
- We set up the customer through the load balancer.
- Then once it is there and functional, then the next step is to add the web application firewall on the same boxes.
YU
reviewer1010148
Security Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
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.
View full review »SS
Sathiya Shunmugasundaram
Site Reliability Engineer at Apple
- Cloud native integration should be provided.
- Native support for containers should be added to future releases, as this is the future of load balancing.
DK
reviewer1441791
Head Of Technology at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
When we purchased the product, we found it to be a bit expensive.
If we decide to migrate to the cloud, I don't think that BIG-IP is a good solution and we probably won't use it.
If the price for a cloud-based deployment can be matched with their competitors the I think it would be a far better solution.
View full review »I think the logging could be improved.
View full review »JK
reviewer839310
ACT Solutions Architect at a venture capital & private equity firm with 51-200 employees
As a service provider, we will target F5 BIG-IP VE solutions to customers who request infrastructure as a service. Improvements should enable customers to build a tailor-made solution in the future through a service portal.
View full review »They have to scale, developing more products.
I would like them to have more flexible models.
View full review »It would help to get more training, even better in local languages. While we are able to speak and understand English, sometimes it is much easier to use the language you truly understand.
View full review »They can improve on the DDOS solution and have more stable solutions.
View full review »AF
Technicab017
Technical Team Leader at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
We would like to see load balancing between the cloud and the on-premise, a straightforward deployment feature.
View full review »There is room for improvement with their firmware quality control. A bug in the firmware caused hardware failures.
View full review »
It’s quite expensive compared to the other vendors. F5 lacks a pay-as-you-grow licensing scheme as offered by other companies, which makes acquiring their products more expensive at the outset.F5’s support for low-end platforms is also dismal, with continued restrictions imposed on such systems making it difficult for them to cater to small to medium-sized business. You might be forced to buy more expensive systems just to get the features you want and not the performance benefits of the more expensive system.I'm also concerned about F5’s continued push on new hardware platforms to generate sales.Finally, one must be able to handle the complexity and knowledge required for deploying F5’s ADC products. Selecting a reliable and experienced partner is crucial to get the right configuration for your needs and for you to be able to maximize your ADC investment.
View full review »
SN
Develope0fe0
Developer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Certificate management needs improvement. I would like automated deployment of new certificates without manual intervention to be in the next release of this product.
View full review »NA
Hu231Anly367
Thermicien with 51-200 employees
The pricing could be improved.
View full review »JM
reviewer1360833
Technology Analyst at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
The configuration is intricate and could be improved.
For a future release, I would like to see more features in the cloud.
View full review »Security and Reporting.
View full review »They need to improve the interface and some of the functionalities.
View full review »We need best-practice information. They have something called DevCentral and a blog. But we want something from F5 itself regarding how to tackle the false-positive configurations. If you go into detail with so many configurations it will find so many false positives from the moment it is enabled that it will quickly impact your applications, and it will not work.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
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