Introducing the F5 LTM ActiveGate monitoring plugin

Dynatrace is continuously working to expand our monitoring coverage to include critical components within our customers’ technology stack.  The challenge with monitoring security-related technologies such as F5’s BIG-IP LTM devices is their inhospitality to agent-based monitoring approaches.  Building upon the foundational work of the ActiveGate plugin framework, Dynatrace is pleased to announce the availability of remote F5 LTM monitoring, available through our new ActiveGate extension.

Prerequisites

• F5 BIG-IP LTM device(s) with iControl® API support
• Credentials for F5 admin account or non-admin account with iControl_REST_API_User role
• An Environment ActiveGate (version 1.155+) that has the ActiveGate plugin module installed, and isn’t used for synthetic or mainframe monitoring
  • One environment ActiveGate can typically support 30-50 F5 LTM devices

What’s Included

Every minute, Dynatrace remotely ingests all of the most crucial data from your F5 devices, using the ActiveGate extension. However, without proper context, all this data is just noise. Data from the F5 ActiveGate extension is continuously analyzed by the Dynatrace platform, and is used to provide answers to one of the most critical monitoring questions – how are my F5 instances performing?  F5 monitoring with Dynatrace helps you separate the signal from the noise.

Using key metrics, properties and events from F5 instances, Dynatrace gains real-time visibility into the health and performance of your network.  The resulting insights are presented to you through automatically generated visualization tools, dashboards, infographics, and reports.  We separate the signal from noise.

The F5 ActiveGate extension is easy to deploy and is developed, maintained, and fully-supported by Dynatrace.  Simply put, it provides F5 monitoring using the best-in-class functionality that you’ve come to expect from Dynatrace.

What’s next

F5 LTM monitoring with Dynatrace is getting better. With upcoming updates to Davis® (our A.I. engine), data from ActiveGate extensions will be incorporated into our root-cause analysis. This means we will soon be able to deliver insights that go beyond device performance. We will provide answers to the other critical question — which service/customer-impacting problems are attributable to issues with F5 devices in your network?

Interested in adding F5 monitoring to your Dynatrace experience?

The quickest way to get started is to reach out to Dynatrace One