Load balancer dashboards

The Load Balancer dashboards monitor network load balancing with F5 BIG IP technology. The Load Balancer dashboards provide an insight into the distribution of network traffic across server resources in multiple geographies. These servers can be on premises or hosted on cloud. These dashboards provide visualizations on the performance and availability of your global applications.

Data centers that are spread geographically can slow down user requests and network traffic needs that must be managed instantly and load balance during peak demands and downtime. The number of application connection requests and utilization from users can exceed the capacity of a server that hosts the application. The load balancing mechanism helps to distribute the inbound requests and processing load of responses across a group of servers that run the same application effectively.

Load balancer components

Typically, the load balancer services that are based on F5 technology consists of the following components:
  • Global Traffic Manager (GTM)

    GTM is also called as BIG-IP DNS that improves the performance and availability of your global applications by sending users to the closest or best-performing physical, virtual, or cloud environment. It also hyperscales and secures your DNS infrastructure from DDoS attacks.

    BIG-IP’s module built to monitor the availability and performance of global resources and use that information to manage network traffic patterns.

  • Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

    BIG-IP’s module that manages and optimizes traffic for network applications and clients. BIG-IP LTM treats all network traffic as stateful connection flows. Even connectionless protocols such as User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) are tracked as flows.

  • Virtual servers

    A virtual server allows BIG-IP systems to send, receive, process, and relay network traffic. A virtual server is a proxy of the actual server (physical, virtual, or container). Combined with a virtual IP address, which is the application endpoint that is presented to the outside world.

  • Pools

    A configuration object that groups pool members together to receive and process network traffic that is determined by a specified load balancing algorithm. Collections of similar services available on any number of hosts.

  • Pool members

    A pool member is a node and service port to which BIG-IP LTM can load balance the network traffic. Nodes can be members of multiple pools.

    The pool member includes the definition of the application port and the IP address of the physical or virtual server. Refer to it as the service. Unique load balancing and health monitoring based on the services instead of the host.

  • Nodes

    A configuration object represented by the IP address of a device on the network.

  • Wide IPs

    The Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of a service.

Load balancing methods

Static load balancing methods do not use any traffic metrics from the node to distribute traffic. Dynamic load balancing methods use traffic metrics from the node to distribute traffic.

Health monitors keep a close eye on the health of a resource to deem it available or unavailable. They are independent of load balancing methods.

Performance monitors measure the hosts performance and dynamically send traffic to hosts in the pool. They work with corresponding dynamic load balancing methods. Health monitors can be applied at the node level or at the pool level, but performance monitors can be applied at the node level only.

For more information about the different load balancing methods and algorithms that can be used, see Understanding F5 Load Balancing Methods.