F5 BIG-IQ Reviews

BIG-IQ is just a controller for the appliances of BIG-IP. That's our main use case.

It saves you a lot of work and time. With this solution, any person can manage all of the appliances at once.

The solution is very easy to manage.

It's great at saving time if you have a lot of appliances and you want to show a configuration of all of them at once. It's a great tool for managing your control of all of your BIG-IP appliances.

It's great for engineers or users that have a solid background in networking and protocols. If they know how everything works within the IT industry or deal with security it's easy for them to use.

The GUI is fine, at least from an engineer's perspective.

Overall, the solution is quite good, for how I use it.

The user interface could be a bit better.

The compatibility with the Hyper-V from Microsoft for cloud deployments could be improved.

You do need to have a good and solid background or foundation for networking and you need to understand how to configure F5 appliances in order to properly use it. It's not for a novice user.

I think they need to work with their automation within BIG-IQ or the BIG-IP. Almost everything has automation.

They could use YAML or JSON if they wanted to make it a little bit easier for us.

I only have a little bit of experience with the solution. I've been using it for about one year.

The stability is great. The solution is very reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't glitches. 

The scalability is great. I love F5. If a company needs to expand it, they can do so relatively easily, especially if they are using a Viprion appliance.

There's only two to four of us on the solution that have admin rights. We may expand in the future

So far, we've been satisfied with technical support. They are quite responsive and knowledgable. We haven't had a problem with them at all.

I used to use Cisco. I really liked it. Now, I prefer F5. Both are excellent solutions. They're in the top tier for sure.

Each one of them has its own functionality. Cisco has switches, routers, et cetera, from its products. F5, is mainly known as a load balancer for applications, for data centers, et cetera. They're hard to compare as the kind-of move in different spaces, however, they're both great.

I've had some issues with the virtual deployment, or cloud deployment, for BIG-IQ. The compatibility with the Hyper-V from Microsoft is not very good.

When you are trying to implement a new VM, if you have already purchased BIG-IP from the website and you're trying to deploy it in the cloud (or you have a hypervisor), it's not so smooth to deal in terms of the interface. This is also true for Citrix servers. The only one that's worked perfectly for us was the VMware and virtual machine.

I don't really deal with pricing. That's more on the product manager. They handle product licensing. I don't have any idea how much the solution costs.

This solution is one of the finest in the industry.

New users considering the solution need to understand that they need to have a solid background in networking and a few security verticals in order to successfully work with the solution. Without that, they won't be able to do anything with it beyond a basic integration. If you want to move to more advanced functionality, then you have to do programming. If you were going to implement it into a company that has a lot of web servers, you need to be familiar with APIs, JSON, JavaScript, et cetera.

Overall, I'd rate it eight out of ten. It's pretty great, and I love working with it, however, no solution is a perfect ten out of ten.

The most valuable features are load balancing and WAF.

I had trouble with high availability deployment in my environment. I had searched for solutions online but have not been able to determine the root of the problem. Ultimately, I contacted F5 support to resolve the issue.

I would like to see the Advanced Web Application Firewall included with this solution.

I have been using F5 BIG-IQ for about three years.

At the moment, this solution is stable.

The F5 solution scales very easily. If we have more boxes then we can just join them to the cluster.

The support team has good knowledge and attitude when working with me to solve my issues. I prefer the support team in Vietnam because they have more personnel and I think that it is better.

It took approximately three months to deploy.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It is primarily around internet-facing web application security. It works very well.

We needed the product due to increased risk through security exposures.

I don't think it has improved my organizational functions. 

There is a lot less risk involved in having applications available on the Internet.

Scalability: To move from larger boxes to smaller boxes, along with virtualization. So, we are not locked into a particular size.

The reliability is excellent.

The scalability is excellent. It can move configurations between environments. It scales up and down, and has virtualization as well. 

The technical support is very good. We have had to use them only on a small number of occasions.

It was already in place when I joined.

I would like the product to be cheaper.

They are working to make the product more feature-rich all the time. Look for capabilities and features, not just price. The one thing that we found was that the F5 device does multiple aspects as opposed to having to put in different things to different devices for different functions. This made sense to us that we could do all our functions out of the same device. We didn't have to buy different devices for different functions.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Support
• Availability
• Reliability.

The use cases we're trying to implement together all access to their DMV and to deploy and add data to their data center. They were already using Citrix, but they wanted to replace it. I don't know why, but I think they already had contact with the F5 team.

Features like AFM, the Gateway, and Global DNS are the coolest features that save work for us.

The shell, kernel, or Linux has something like a delay, especially with the Virtual Edition when you are trying to implement it in the cloud and you want to access it remotely with web management. It would be great if they could improve their kernel. It was difficult for me, especially when I got started with BIG-IP. I was struggling to find which commands work with it. If you want to work with it, you have to be a Linux guy.

The GUI tries to be professional to work with. It's not designed for an amateur or someone that is just trying to get into the ADC world, network, or application delivery services.

We have been using this solution in-house for three months. Before that, I was studying BIG-IP and BIG-IQ. When we are already designed for a specific customer, then we have to implement it.

The stability of this solution is great.

In our current situation, we're not scaling anything, but in the future, as I know from my friend in the technical background at F5, we might look into scaling up.

The number of users depends if you look at our company size or the professional services from the F5 team. From my side, there would be two members. For remote, it would be two or three.

Their technical support is perfect. They were so supportive. The guys are great and they would do anything for you.

That's the problem, it's Linux. If you want to go to the config management at first, then you have to know the Linux command in order to have an IP configuration for your interfaces. After that, you'll have to manage it on the web. The initial configuration has to be on Linux, though. It was complex for me to set up BIG-IQ because I was coming in from a Windows background, not Linux.

The deployment time would be about two hours.

First, call F5 support before trying to implement it by yourself. That's what I tried to do and there were a bunch of problems, so I would call their support first.

I would give this solution a nine out of ten.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

BIG-IQ is a centralized management system for F5 appliances. For customers with multiple data centers or a lot of F5 appliances, it helps to manage their environment. With a centralized solution, it is easier to complete tasks like software upgrades and performing backups.

The most valuable feature is the centralized management.

The reporting feature is quite good.

Integration with VAS is something that they need to work on.

I have been using BIG-IQ for close to one year.

My understanding is that the latest release is quite stable.

In this product, scalability is related to the number of devices. It is really good and it can scale up to 30 instances. The majority of our customers are medium-sized companies and enterprise-level organizations.

I have not had contact with technical support because I haven't had to raise any tickets.

Prior to BIG-IQ, F5 had a similar product called Enterprise Manager. It went end-of-life and was replaced with BIG-IQ. The reporting, integration, and certificate server have all been improved.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. The length of time required for deployment depends on the use case. If the customer is only installing the LTM and the APM then it will not take long. If, however, there are multiple modules involved then it may take longer. This is because it takes time for the configurations to be loaded, especially for the VAS platforms and the policies.

Licensing fees are based on the number of devices.

Overall, this is a good solution and I would recommend it but they need better integration with VAS.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.