HAProxy Room for Improvement

Vijay Muddu - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager server admin and security at Vivaconnect

HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement.

In the future, the tool should have additional modules for different purposes.

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Landry  Mbala - PeerSpot reviewer
Développeur applications at Trust Merchant Bank

There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper. 

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Roger Seelaender - PeerSpot reviewer
UCaaS Engineering Manager at EarthLink

The solution can be improved by controlling TCP behavior better rather than just reporting them in the logs. Automatic blocking of clients that don't properly close their TCP session (CH/CD) would be good.

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Buyer's Guide
HAProxy
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about HAProxy. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
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Bhaskar Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Network Engineer at Yamaha

Although HAProxy is essentially open-source, many features are not available.

While troubleshooting, we are having some difficulties. There are no issues when it is running; it is stable and very good; however, if there is a troubleshooting issue or an incident occurs, we will have issues because this is open-source.

We are only experiencing problems at that time. Otherwise, everything is fine.

Because we need to search for a document or some troubleshooting information. That could be beneficial to us.

To resolve the troubleshooting issues, additional documentation and troubleshooting are required.

The product is satisfactory. However, additional documentation, additional technical documents, and troubleshooting steps are the types of things that can only make this solution better. Also, more clarity on where the package is hitting and where it is stopping is needed.

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Nathanel Sulimanov - PeerSpot reviewer
Platform Architect at SES

HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations. 

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AANKITGUPTAA - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Pi DATACENTERS

The product should have more security and dashboard functionality for monitoring so that any administrator can see the usability and track all the incoming and outgoing requests. It should have a better dashboard GUI, and more security models should be there. The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs. We need it to be more visible.

Documentation could be better.

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Tasos Papadopoulos - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at Qivos

The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added. Something that might help with syntax or common use cases.

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Tomislav Horvatović - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at Styria IT

There is room for improvement in HAProxy's dynamic configuration. Currently, dynamic changes are lost when reloading the service, and it would be beneficial if dynamic configuration changes could be applied without losing the configuration or reloading the service, ensuring backups and preserving the static configuration.

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KS
Manager - IT Infrastructure and Network at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

HAProxy could improve by making the dashboards easier to use, and better reports and administration tickets.

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JT
UNIX System Administrator at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

The logging is pretty hard to understand, but the documentation for the logging is decent. That would be my only criticism. Sometimes it's challenging to get through the log, and you need a log to understand what is going on. It isn't easy to map the logging with the documentation, and every time I read the log, I have to pull out the documentation to understand what I'm reading.

And there is some more functionality that I would like to see. For example, you'll do a TLS to the front leg— whatever connects to your load balancer. You do the HTBS or whatever TLS connection there. And then, on the back end, you usually have to clear it a lot of times. I want to be able to do TLS all the way through on both legs. I don't know if it can do that. HAProxy might be able to do this already, but I haven't done enough research to see if this is possible

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AICARDO Sylvain - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engeneer at Inatum

I'd like to see better documentation and preferably a French version as well. The product is used a lot here and that would be helpful.

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SB
Senior Systems Architect at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

The web stats UI, which provides the status of the health and numbers, could greatly benefit from having a RESTful interface to control the load-balanced nodes. Although there is a hack around the UI (by issuing a POST request to HAProxy with parameters), a RESTful interface would greatly improve the automation process (through Chef and Ansible).

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TH
Software Engineering Lead at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime.

We would like to see dynamic ACL and port update support. Our infrastructure relies on randomly allocated ports and this feature would allow us to update without restarting the process. The ACL add/update would help with some direct routing challenges that currently require us to work around them with a map and static back-ends.

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HA
DevOps Tech Lead at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

HAProxy running in multiple cores, for example one for HTTP and another for HTTPS, requires the use of "nbproc". So if nbproc = 2, you will have two processes of HAProxy running. However, the stats of HAProxy are not aggregated, meaning you don't really know the collective status in a single point of view. Each process has its own socket and it's up to you to aggregate them, and then your stats become less accurate.

Also, having multiple HAProxy nodes in High Availability mode requires the use of clustering software such as Pacemaker and Corosync which are very complex.

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ST
Director at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

There is no standardized document available. So, any individual has to work from scratch to work it out. If some standard deployment details are available, it would be helpful for people while deploying it. There should be more documentation on the standard deployment.

When you have to customize it for your application requirements, there are a lot of challenges. There should be more support for customization. To customize it better, there should be some kind of programming integration.

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JT
UNIX System Administrator at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

The logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic. Additional logging functionality with better documentation would be helpful.

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it_user719457 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

The documentation is extremely detailed, but I think it could be restructured so it isn't so daunting for beginners.

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AA
Software Engineer at a non-profit with 1,001-5,000 employees

The product has the basic foundations of any load-balancing product. It is simple and basic. The product does not have any new technologies.

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it_user814488 - PeerSpot reviewer
Expert Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The basic clustering is not usable in our very specific setup. The clustering is mainly a configuration replication and is great in a case of active-passive usage. In the case of an active-active (or with more than two nodes) where the configuration is not fully identical, it cannot be used as-is.

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it_user809919 - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at a media company with 501-1,000 employees

The only area that I can see needing improvement is the management interface, since it is pretty much all through the CLI or configuration. However, HAProxy does have another product that we evaluated called ALOHA, which has a web front-end, but we found it did not meet our needs.

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Abduh  Rumfot - PeerSpot reviewer
It Security Consultant at juke

The visibility could be improved. Stability can falter when there is a lot of traffic. End-to-end connections are limited. 

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Nasir Otis - PeerSpot reviewer
Network & Cloud Architect at Koala Compute Inc.

I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit.

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it_user707175 - PeerSpot reviewer
Production Engineering at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

The GUI is clunky and the on-board metric viewing solution is poor. We ship metrics off the appliance to InfluxDB (using CollectIT, which is bundled with the appliance), to view them directly with Grafana.

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Aleksei Grishutin - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

The solution has bad performance issues. 

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OA
Senior Vice President of TechOps at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

A better GUI would be nice.

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AZ
CTO & Founder at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs. 

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it_user716574 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

While the product is quite perfect, it could use more supervision and be more active. Also, more simplicity, more peripherals, and more scalability.

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it_user704013 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology / Software Development with 501-1,000 employees

I would improve the web-based UI, but it’s a matter of personal preference.

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it_user860877 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Operations Engineer

We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files.

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MN
Deployment Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

In my opinion, there are three main areas to improve:

  1. Make remote management more modern by adding API.
  2. Propose a general HA solution for HAProxy (no I'm using keepalived for this).
  3. Thread option should be a bit more stable.
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SI
Consultor at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

From my point of view, the configuration should be more friendly, perhaps with a Web interface. For example, I work with the ClusterControl product for Severalnines, and we have a Web interface to deploy the HAProxy load-balancer.

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it_user854778 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. System Administrator Linux & AWS at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees

They should introduce one feature that I know many people, including me, are waiting for: HAProxy should have provide hot-swipe for back-end servers, no downtime while shifting back-end servers.

They also need a more detailed GUI for monitoring and configuration.

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it_user860874 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company

It needs proper HTTP/2 support.

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it_user856617 - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy Manager and Lead - IT Managed Services at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I would like to evaluate load-balancing algorithms other than round robin and SSL offloading.

Also, it would be helpful if I could logically divide the HAProxy load-balancing into multiple entities so that I would install one HA Proxy LB application which could be used for different Web servers for different applications. I am not sure if these features are available.

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it_user854253 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software engineer

Maybe HAProxy could be more modular. 

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it_user702264 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering Systems Manager and Data Scientist at a marketing services firm with 201-500 employees
  • Availability of REST API for Configuration and Reporting
  • An even bigger suite of Load Balancing algorithms
  • Documentation
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reviewer996537 - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps-Infrastructure Team Leader at a tech company with 201-500 employees

I would like to see a two (or more) native cluster support without third parties or DNS manipulations.

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it_user862527 - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

HAProxy needs to improve its ability to handle a lot of connections, to be more like NGINX.

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IY
Network security at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved. 

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Buyer's Guide
HAProxy
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about HAProxy. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.