F5 Big-IP was designed to ensure application availability by providing load balancing, security, acceleration and other services.
In order to function in all circumstances F5 BIG-IP is typically deployed in a high availability configuration making sure that applications will be available even if one BIG-IP fails.
And while F5 BIG-IP is rock solid and failures are rare, consequences of such failures are usually catastrophic, and therefore we have to make sure to detect and understand symptoms and prevent such accidents before they occur. If not configured correctly or if an F5 BIG-IP in high availability configuration does not function properly, possible failure in one BIG-IP can bring an entire network down and make your application unavailable.
In order to detect such cases and help you address them before catastrophic events occur, HYCU SCOM management pack for F5 BIG-IP can detect and warn you.
These warnings can occur because of the following:
- Trust between F5 BIG-IP devices is broken. Broken trust might cause unexpected behavior such as configuration not being synced among all devices or devices not being able to fail over to one another after the trust is broken.
- Inconsistent states are reported for devices in Sync Failover Group. If devices report different statuses for each other there might be something wrong with the HA network or their configuration making high availability uncertain in case of a needed failover.
- Number of available devices in Sync Failover Group is below threshold. We always require at least one device to be available for failover. In certain applications, we can require more to ensure availability in all circumstances
- Configuration within devices in Sync Failover Group not being synchronized, This case might be caused by a number of possible reasons, but can lead to unexpected behavior in case of failover and needs to be addressed.
- Single or Multiple F5 BIG-IP Failover Events, this may indicate that there is something wrong with device configuration or that a primary device is repeatedly failing after becoming active after failover.
- Applications are not healthy on passive devices. Due to network issues, applications (virtual servers), pools and pool members can be unavailable on passive devices while they are available on an active device. If an active device fails and failover occurs to a passive device where the application is not available, the application will be unavailable to its users.
If you would like to ensure your high availability and proactively address issues that can potentially lead to major availability accidents, HYCUs SCOM Management Pack for F5 BIG-IP can help you. You can try HYCU for 45 days with no obligation. Or If you need any more information or would like to hear about our product benefits or discuss your monitoring needs, feel free to contact us at info@hycu.com.