How healthy is your virtual server pool?

The answer depends on the strategy your organization uses to monitor and react to individual virtual server pool member outages. Some organizations, usually have smaller number of virtual server pool members in the pool, and choose to treat each member failure as critical and wish to react immediately. Pool member down alerts from HYCU SCOM Management Pack for F5 BIG-IP are forwarded to an application infrastructure team to address and fix the issue.

Some organizations may decide to treat single pool member failures differently and do not consider it critical until a larger number of pool members have failed. They usually have a larger number of virtual server pool members in a pool, where pool members are sized to handle possible outages or traffic peaks. This does not mean that a single pool member failure is not important, but it might not require an immediate escalation and need to wake up someone in the middle of the night to handle this failure. A situation like this can typically be resolved during normal business hours if the problem does not escalate and additional failures occur. In that case, an immediate action is needed.

With HYCU SCOM Management Pack for F5 BIG-IP version 5.7

We have introduced a new monitor to handle such scenarios. A critical alert can be configured and issued once virtual server pool capacity in terms of available pool members has been lowered to a specific percentage. Single pool member failure alerts can be now replaced with alerts generated on virtual server pool capacity reduction.

Additionally the latest version of HYCU SCOM Management Pack for F5 BIG-IP delivers:

• Support for the latest F5 BIG-IP releases: This product version extends compatibility with F5 BIG-IP to include also the F5 BIG-IP release versions 14.1 and 15.0.
• Performance improvements for large F5 BIG-IP environments: Major performance improvements on monitoring large LTM configurations having large numbers of configuration objects (virtual servers, pools and pool members) on single BIG-IP device.
• Support for SNMP protocol version 3: SNMP protocol (SNMPv3) can now be used to discover F5 BIG-IP device improving security and privacy.
• Enhanced reporting: Filtering and pre-defined parameters are added to the reports for a better user experience.
• Support for customized iControl REST API port numbers: F5 BIG-IP devices that are configured to use a non-default iControl REST API port can be monitored.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can check out a free evaluation at F5 BIG-IP Management Pack free eval! Or, feel free to reach out directly to us at info@hycu.com.