posted on Friday, April 23, 2010 12:29 PM
I think we're all aware that the overall health of anything but a very simple application depends on all of the various components’ health, such as the web server, the overall operating system, the BIG-IP pool members, and potentially the virtual machine that the web server runs on. The traditional way of taking all of these components into account is to periodically test the end result: Is the site responding to pings? Is anyone complaining?
The Application Designer for IIS 7 is an extension to the F5 Management Pack that enables a more comprehensive, holistic view of your application's health in Operations Manager:
In the diagram above (annotations in red text), each BIG-IP pool member is paired with it's related components, and together represent an 'Application Instance'. The health of the App Instance by default represents the worst health of any of it's member components. In turn, the overall application's health depends on at least one of the App Instances being healthy as well as the health of the virtual server.
This has some great practical uses beyond just the pretty diagram. For example:
- Your BIG-IP pool member may healthy because the HTTP monitor on the BIG-IP is succeeding, but one of the other components may have detected a serious problem such as dangerously low memory or compromised security. In this case, the app instance will go into a critical state and can be configured to fire an alert or take remedial action such as disabling the BIG-IP pool member.
- If the BIG-IP’s monitor indicates that the web site is down, many of possibly culprits of the outage are quickly in view for root cause analysis.
- Statistics from the various components are all available and can be aggregated to gain a much better idea of how your application is responding and whether it needs to be scaled up
- Monitoring on the BIG-IP can be replaced by the monitoring included in this pack, reducing load on the BIG-IP
This application designer has two primary uses cases:
BIG-IP Auto-Configuration: You have the option of creating applications where the BIG-IP has not yet been configured with any pool members, pools, or virtual servers. Here is an example of a newly created application that targets a BIG-IP whose LTM configuration is blank:
As you can see, there is no virtual server and there are no pool members shown. The application and the applications instances are red, in this case meaning that the BIG-IP objects need to be configured. Here are the related alerts:
Tasks are available for each of these alerts that create the VIP, pool, and pool members on the BIG-IP according to best practices for IIS websites including configuring profiles for optimal performance.
Application Monitoring: If your BIG-IP is already configured or you would like to manually configure it, you can opt to simply discover your existing configuration. When you discover an existing configuration, the diagram looks like the first screenshot in this post right out of the box.
I hope that you’ll find this extension brings the dream of a “single pane of glass” closer to a reality. Here are some resources on this pack – watch for more to emerge in the near future:
