Gain insights into the performance of your F5 BIG-IP LTM and DNS solutions.
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Overview
Use the F5 BIG-IP extension with SNMP to collect data remotely.
Data is collected from your F5 devices every minute and continuously analyzed by the Dynatrace platform.
The insights provided go beyond simple charting capabilities cover both the Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and DNS (formerly Global Traffic Manager) modules of the BIG-IP platform.
The unified analysis pages offer insight into the health and performance of the platform, while the Dynatrace analytics engine baselines and alerts on the most important indicators. The topology-first approach allows Davis AI to investigate and correlate detected problems between components and identify root causes.
This page is intended for users who want to:
Monitor the health state and performance of their F5 BIG-IP devices
Look for analysis support for Ops, IT, and network admins.
This enables you to:
Monitor infrastructure with a comprehensive dashboard
Detect traffic anomalies and set up alerting for them
Take pre-emptive measures to avoid service degradations
Use cases
Monitor F5 infrastructure and resource utilization
Understand the health and performance of Local Traffic Manager and DNS
Enable alerting on detected anomalies
Capture BIG-IP notifications by integrating with the SNMP Traps extension.
Requirements
Activate the extension in your environment web-UI using the in-product Hub, provide the necessary device configuration, and you’re all set.
SNMP data source configuration for metric ingestion
Topology and relationship definitions for physical (BIG-IP instance, disks, network interfaces) and logical (LTM & DNS virtual servers, pools, pool members, etc.) components of the BIG-IP platform.
Dashboards offering LTM & DNS monitoring overviews and a high level status overview
Alerts covering component availability and resource utilization
This extension runs all SNMP queries every minute. Once data is produced, this is ingested as metric datapoints and subject to license consumption. Whether you are on a Classic or DPS license model, the measurement unit for metric ingestion is based on metric datapoints.
To estimate the amount of metric datapoints produced by your extension configuration, use the following list which gives you a number of metrics per feature set and a multiplier value depending on which entity the metric is split by. Add all of these up and you will have the number of datapoints produced every minute.
default: 3 x F5 Devices
chassis-components: 2 x Fans + 1 x Power supplies + 1 x F5 Devices
device-packet-stats: 10 x F5 Devices
device-entity-counts: 3 x F5 Devices
device-connection-stats: 10 x F5 Devices
instance-sync: 1 x F5 Devices
instance-memory-basic: 2 x F5 Devices
instance-cpu-basic: 10 x F5 Devices
instance-memory-advanced: 5 x F5 Devices
apm-licenses: 2 x F5 Devices
disk: 3 x Disks
interface: 12 x Interfaces
rule: 3 x LTM iRules
gtm-irule: 3 x DNS iRules
profile-http: 6 x HTTP profiles
profile-clientssl: 14 x Client SSL profiles
profile-server-ssl: 9 x Server SSL profiles
profile-serverssl-handshakes-basic: 2 x Server SSL profiles
profile-serverssl-handshakes-advanced: 2 x Server SSL profiles
gtm-dns-profile-state: 1 x DNS profiles
gtm-dns-profile-metrics: 10 x DNS profiles
virtualserver-connectivity-basic: 4 x LTM Virtual servers
virtualserver-syn-cookies: 2 x LTM Virtual servers
virtualserver-advanced: 9 x LTM Virtual servers
virtualserver-basic: 1 x LTM Virtual servers
virtualserver-connectivity-advanced: 3 x LTM Virtual servers
pool-basic: 3 x LTM Pools
pool-connectivity: 4 x LTM Pools
pool-advanced: 4 x LTM Pools
node-basic: 2 x LTM Pool members
node-advanced: 4 x LTM Pool members
node-connectivity: 3 x LTM Pool members
gtm-dnssec: 3 x F5 Devices
gtm-virtual-server-state: 1 x DNS Virtual servers
gtm-virtual-server-metrics-traffic: 5 x DNS Virtual servers
gtm-virtual-server-metrics-resources: 2 x DNS Virtual servers
gtm-virtual-server-metrics-lb: 3 x DNS Virtual servers
gtm-wide-ip-state: 2 x DNS Wide IPs
gtm-wide-ip-metrics: 10 x DNS Wide IPs
gtm-pool-state: 1 x DNS Pools
gtm-pool-metrics: 6 x DNS Pools
gtm-pool-member-state: 1 x DNS Pool members
For example, for a monitoring configuration where all feature sets are enabled, containing 1 F5 BIG-IP Device which has 1 Fan, 1 Power supply, 1 Disk, 1 Interface, 1 LTM iRule, 1 GTM iRule, 1 HTTP profile, 1 Client SSL profile, 1 Server SSL profile, 1 DNS profile, 1 LTM Virtual server, 1 LTM Pool, 1 LTM Pool member, 1 DNS Wide IP, 1 DNS Virtual server, 1 DNS Pool, 1 DNS Pool member, the extension produces 188 metric datapoints per minute.
By extrapolation, it will ingest:
188 x 60 = 11,280 metric datapoints per hour
188 x 60 x 24 = 270,720 metric datapoints per day
188 x 60 x 24 x 365 = 98,812,800 metric datapoints per year
Tips for avoiding license overconsumption:
LTM and DNS modules are rarely configured both on the same device. You should check in advance which applies to your device and only enable those feature sets.
Make use of the rich filtering configuration to only monitor those entities relevant to you, not the entire system.
Feature sets
When activating your extension using monitoring configuration, you can limit monitoring to one of the feature sets. To work properly the extension has to collect at least one metric after the activation.
In highly segmented networks, feature sets can reflect the segments of your environment. Then, when you create a monitoring configuration, you can select a feature set and a corresponding ActiveGate group that can connect to this particular segment.
All metrics that aren't categorized into any feature set are considered to be the default and are always reported.
A metric inherits the feature set of a subgroup, which in turn inherits the feature set of a group. Also, the feature set defined on the metric level overrides the feature set defined on the subgroup level, which in turn overrides the feature set defined on the group level.
The number of excessive collisions, incremented for each frame that experienced 16 collisions during transmission and was aborted on the specified interface.
The host memory in bytes currently in use (not including TMM). This is for a single host system.
instance-sync
Metric name
Metric key
Description
Failover and Sync status
com.dynatrace.extension.f5.bigip.sys.cm.state
The failover and config synchronization status of the device. Failover states can be: (0)unknown - the failover status of the device is unknown; (1)offline - the device is offline; (2)forcedOffline - the device is forced offline; (3)standby - the device is standby; (4)active - the device is active. Synchronization status can be: unknown(0), syncing(1), needManualSync(2), inSync(3), syncFailed(4), syncDisconnected(5), standalone(6), awaitingInitialSync(7), incompatibleVersion(8), partialSync(9)
The hierarchical load balance state for the specified node address, including parent status. Value is always 1. Status dimension takes values: unchecked(0), checking(1), inband(2), up(3), addr-down(18), down(19), forced-down(20), maint(21), irule-down(22), inband-down(23), down-manual-resume(24)
General state metric for the pool_member. Value is always 1, but dimensions 'Enabled state' and 'Availability state' define the state. The availability state takes the following values: 0 (none/error); 1 (green/available in some capacity); 2 (yellow/not currently available); 3 (red/not available); 4 (blue/availability is unknown); 5 (gray/unlicensed). Enabled state takes values 0 (none), 1 (enabled), 2 (disabled), 3 (disabled by parent).
physical-sensors
Metric name
Metric key
Description
Physical Sensor Value
com.dynatrace.extension.f5.bigip.sensor.value
The most recent measurement obtained by the agent for this sensor. entPhySensorValue
pool-basic
Metric name
Metric key
Description
Members
com.dynatrace.extension.f5.bigip.pool.member.cnt
The total number of members in the specified pool.
The number of the current active members in the specified pool.
Pool state
com.dynatrace.extension.f5.bigip.pool.state
General state metric for the pool. Value is always 1, but dimensions 'Enabled state' and 'Availability state' define the state. The availability state takes the following values: 0 (none/error); 1 (green/available in some capacity); 2 (yellow/not currently available); 3 (red/not available); 4 (blue/availability is unknown); 5 (gray/unlicensed). Enabled state takes values 0 (none), 1 (enabled), 2 (disabled), 3 (disabled by parent).
The number of total connections to the specified virtual server.
instance-memory-advanced
Metric name
Metric key
Description
Total swap
com.dynatrace.extension.f5.bigip.mem.total.swap
The total amount of swap space configured for this host.
Available swap
com.dynatrace.extension.f5.bigip.mem.avail.swap
The amount of swap space currently unused or available.
Shared memory
com.dynatrace.extension.f5.bigip.mem.shared
The total amount of real or virtual memory currently allocated for use as shared memory. This object will not be implemented on hosts where the underlying operating system does not explicitly identify memory as specifically reserved for this purpose.
Cached memory
com.dynatrace.extension.f5.bigip.mem.cached
The total amount of real or virtual memory currently allocated for use as cached memory. This object will not be implemented on hosts where the underlying operating system does not explicitly identify memory as specifically reserved for this purpose.
Buffer memory
com.dynatrace.extension.f5.bigip.mem.buffer
The total amount of real or virtual memory currently allocated for use as memory buffers. This object will not be implemented on hosts where the underlying operating system does not explicitly identify memory as specifically reserved for this purpose.
The actual speed of the indexed chassis fan on the system. This is only supported for the platform where the actual fan speed data is available.'0' means fan speed is unavailable while the associated chassis status is good.
