Viewing Cookie-insert Persistence Records

One of the advantages of cookie insert persistence is to avoid memory allocation on the load balancer.

Especially if you need to handle persistence for millions of clients (may happen as well during a DoS attack) I see it as an advantage, that the BIG-IP does not keep track locally.

As especially with cookie insert mode the persistence cookie will have a determined name or a configurable name you can easily use a plugin to your webbrowser to check, if a persistence cookie is returned.

You can do this even locally on your bigip by using i.e. cURL after adjusting the path:

 curl -I http://10.131.131.120/ | grep -iE '^set-cookie'
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0   984    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=168236696.554161526
Set-Cookie: StaticCookie=lb-net_static
Set-Cookie: BIGipServerpool_test=1904444170.20480.0000; path=/  

In case your virtual servers are processing SSL and do SSL termination (as mandatory to insert a cookie) cURL can be used as well:

 curl -kI https://10.131.131.120/ | grep -iE '^set-cookie'
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0   984    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=587552285.991263425
Set-Cookie: StaticCookie=lb-net_static
Set-Cookie: BIGipServerpool_test=1854112522.20480.0000; path=/