Passing Pool Member Port using Custom TCP Monitor

That's not quite what I was planning on. You are right that I should use the alias port to monitor a different application, but, I want to see if the F5 can send requests to an external monitoring agent. Contained in the call to this external agent would be the application's port. Then the agent could call the actual application that is being load balanced and tell the F5 that it is functioning properly.

 

 

The main problem is that the applications that are being load balanced don't handle a basic TCP connection very well. As I outlined in another forum post (http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=53&forumid=32&postid=61530&view=topic), the application must follow a specific set of steps after a TCP handshake has occurred. If it doesn't, the thread a request is handled on will not be able to receive any calls for a little while after the TCP connection is closed. If the volume is high enough (as it usually is), the finite number of threads that are allowed to handle requests (usually 25) will be used up and the application will refuse all connections.

 

 

This design flaw makes the application difficult to monitor with the standard F5 TCP monitor. So, we are trying to find some other way to monitor it. Can we send the port to an external agent using a custom TCP monitor? Or would you suggest some other method of monitoring this app?