Monitoring F5 BIG-IP Load Balancers

The eG Enterprise provides a specialized F5 BigIp model (see Figure 1) for managing a BIG-IP load balancer.

Figure 1 : The layer model of a BIG-IP load balancer

Every layer of the layer model depicted by Figure 1 is mapped to one/more tests, which uses the host's SNMP MIB to extract critical statistics pertaining to the load balancing activity performed by BIG-IP. The performance metrics reported by these measures reveal the following:

System Monitoring	Is the Big-IP hardware sufficiently sized to handle the incoming load, or is there a CPU or a memory bottleneck? Is I/O activity on the system abnormal? Are context switches kept at a minimum, or are there too many threads contending for CPU resources? How much swap space is currently available in the system? Is it sufficient?
Workload Monitoring	What is the current total workload on the Big-IP load balancer? Has there been any change in the workload over time? How much traffic is the load balancer handling? How many connections
Load Distribution monitoring	Has any of the servers across which the load is being balanced failed? Is network load balanced across all the servers in the pool? Is any server in the pool handling more connection requests than others?