A Day in the Life: Visualizing App Service Performance and Security for AppDev and DevOps

AppDev teams, like their NetOps and SecOps counterparts, start and end their day with a primary goal: ensuring that applications remain healthy, secure, available, and performing well. It's not so easy, though, to always have visibility into app service performance.

The demand for a centralized approach to app visibility continues to grow, as does the size of organizations' portfolios. The proliferation of 100s, 1000s, and 10s of 1000s of apps to meet customer expectations puts a strain on current IT investments. The State of Application Strategy report indicates how complexity rises as modernization increases and that modern and mobile apps are slowly replacing traditional ones. What's getting in the way of delivering personalized experiences is a complex landscape of digital transformation, hyper-speed development, cloud service options, and ever-expanding threat surfaces. Every day, it becomes more challenging to support those critical applications by delivering a great customer experience. For instance, with attack vectors, those critical apps have become the focal point for cyber adversaries costing organizations and disrupting the customer experience.

To address this complexity, we must drive consistency across environments and ensure that AppDev teams and their counterparts have access to unified, easy-to-use, visibility and insight tools to monitor apps externally, and have network visibility all within a centralized management dashboard.

In the first blog of this A Day in the Life series, Zach Westall highlighted that 'a more modern strategy is needed to address previous BIG-IP administration challenges-one that combines RBAC-enabled visibility, analytics, and holistic management workflows for apps in different environments, as well as various automation and self-service scenarios.' A centralized management approach is one way of looking at it, especially for RBAC-enabled visibility and analytics.

In part two of the blog series, we highlighted the fact that 'achieving true visibility around (app) metrics has become complicated for organizations as they've continued to expand their web applications portfolio. And, of course, it's difficult to protect what you can't see.' Once again, a centralized approach offers a modern solution.

F5 released BIG-IQ 8.0 earlier this year to empower AppDev with complete visibility and analytics. BIG-IQ 8.0 includes visibility enhancements and extends role-based access controls (RBAC) to additional workflows and security dashboards (Configuration Analyzer). For example, you're able to assign devs RBAC to view their app health dashboards in BIG-IQ for when issues arise in terms of how their apps are performing.