Load Balancing Web Services
I am looking for a way to collect a single availability number from a web service then use this number in the Dynamic Ratio Load Balancing.
My initial thoughts were to use an External Monitor, and retrieve a value from a REST endpoint on the server, specific for the service. This REST service would return a value 0-100 for the load, then that number would be used in the Dynamic Ratio method.
I had looked into using SNMP, but I think creating a custom MIB for this value may not be supported on the F5 and creating it on both .NET and JAVA is more work than being able to use a REST endpoint.
How are others doing this? Is anyone load balancing to a service endpoint and not to the server level? Does F5 have a preferred method for doing something similar to this?