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Zdenek's avatar
Zdenek
Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
Feb 24, 2024

Central manager - some practical questions

Hi,

This is more to F5 guys here, hopefully somebody will answer..

I struggle to understand how we're supposed to work with Central Manager (CM).

I checked some vids at youtube, git issues, documentation, but:

  1. I see list of services in "My application Services" and the health of each. All are green, health is good, I am confused because this is LAB without any connectivity to pool members, then I find out that it shows "Health good" on all services which are not yet published. Why so? Can't you use something else, like N/A for example for such services? This is just confusing.
  2. second question is where are the pool member health info? When I open deployed service detail I see something like this:

    Whole screen filled with with something what doesn't help me at all, I can click to alert and check logs, but why I cannot click to members and check their current status?

  3. According to this article there's this table related to service health:
     
    Why are you mixing health (healthcheck result) and traffic into one "service status"? Also why "member status unknown" causes Critical service status? That makes no sense, unknown state is either caused by waiting for the health-check result or it's on purpose because I simply don't care what's the health of the server, what is critical on that?
  4. Why list of services don't show IP addresses and ports, you really want your customers to rely only on service name?
  5. OK lets rely on service name, why migration tool (from UCS to CM) completely renamed all my services and created something like this? Name "application_xx" is not really helpful...

     

  6. CM seems to not have any partitions/tenants, are we supposed to have all objects in one bucket? We have, for example,  >1000 certificates, I don't like that idea
  7. And last one, when we can see APM features in CM?
  • Zdenek's avatar
    Zdenek
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus

    Moving this up to hopefully get some comment.

    The biggest pain seems to be Central manager and migration tool in it. I understand some development is ahead but we have big and complex environments and we need to know how mature is the new F5 stuff overall and how is it going to affect us.

    • Zdenek - thanks for pushing this up again. I'll see if I can locate anyone internally to get some eyeballs on this.

  • Zdenek I can give you answers to some of the questions :-)

    Currently there is not any partitions implemented. As everything is based on AS3, where tenant/partition is part of the template, I would expect it to be possible sometime down the road. NEXT has been purposely lightly implemented to remove unused features to make it a more nimble product. If enough push back arises around a feature I believe it will be implemented.

    Regarding APM it is just around the corner.

     

    • Zdenek's avatar
      Zdenek
      Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus

      I understand the concept of having all in AS3, but CM will be a UI and not just UI for one LB but probably all in the environment and as central element I would suppose it supports some kind of object organization, now it seems it is like "hey lets put all into one pile and users will deal with that somehow".

      Removing stuff is also something, how do you know what's unused? For example we don't send you any data what we use. you have quickfiles from support, but it's still not all. Do not remove too much, reason why we pay F5 is that it's been a "swissknife" and that is not "lightweight" stuff from its nature..

      2 questions answered thanks, 5 waiting :) 

      • lnxgeek's avatar
        lnxgeek
        Icon for MVP rankMVP

        You are right, CM is the king of the castle :-)

        I believe that F5 has done a lot of research to figure out what to include and what to remove. I am myself a vivid advocate for the Swiss army knife story, so I understand your take on it.

         

        It is early days, so I'm sure we will have a lot of iterations coming in the next period of time. F5 has historically taken chances on stuff (just look at the iRules - they just guested when they chose to implement it) where they have implemented or changed something without having all the knowledge.

        The best you can do is to express your pains here or through your local F5 team, to tell them what we need.