BIG-IP Report

New version out!

Changes

TLDR;
Added buttons to copy the monitor tests instead of the tooltip version

Bunch of other things has happened under the hood:

* Refactored the monitor send string functions
* Added unit tests for monitor send string functions
* Added Cypress for integration testing
* Refactored and added types for a bunch of functions
* Transpiling via Webpack to:
  - Allow browser friendly module handling while unit tests are still working
  - Bundling all our code into one bundle instead of multiple files

The main reason for the changes above are for us to be able to protect the project against regression errors and ensure that the code quality reaching the end users is good enough.

For those making local changes, please note that the way the js-src is built has been changed. The contribution guide article has been updated accordingly.

DockerHub update

BigIPReport was approved as an Open source project by Dockerhub but upon enrolling the account used to host the Docker images the process got stuck. My contact stopped replying and after multiple reminders and a few months I have now re-submitted the application. Until then I'll keep paying from my own pocket.

The k8s data-collector used to gather data for the report has been pulled over 3500 times so I am guessing at least a few people are using the builds.

Manual installations: https://loadbalancing.se/downloads/bigipreport-v5.6.5.zip 
Kubernetes: bigipreport/data-collector-k8s:v5.6.5 

v5.6.6-beta has been released

• Added much stricter linting rules
• Added parameter typing to almost all functions
• Added prettier for a more consistent code style
• Handling Virtual server masks with value any6
• Graceful handling of policy processing for optional attributes

I will not publish this version as stable as there's way too much code refactoring. However, if you want to help, please go ahead and download it from here:

https://loadbalancing.se/downloads/bigipreport-v5.6.6-beta.zip

There is also a (half-baked) docker-compose example of how to run the data-collector here:
https://github.com/epacke/bigipreport-docker-example

Working on a video guide on how to get started but my right arm is still not recovered from being broken so it's a bit slow. 🙂

A user reported that there are issues with the live polling function in v5.6.6. Last version it worked on seems to be v5.6.1. If you use this function I'd advise to wait with an upgrade.

Fix can be tracked here:
https://github.com/net-utilities/BigIPReport/issues/104

Found more bugs or want features? Join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/RzmjgneW

Polling function has been fixed in v5.6.7-beta together with bug fix from Tim related to the ASM policy indexing.

You can download it here (or pull from DockerHub):
https://loadbalancing.se/downloads/bigipreport-v5.6.7-beta.zip

Found more bugs or want features? Join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/RzmjgneW

Would appreciate some feedback. If you run version above v5.5.0 and use an F5 in front of it, could you please try this iRule? It makes the web server serve the Brotli compressed files instead of the Json files and it should accelerate the loading times quite a lot. Would be interesting to hear load times before and after:

when HTTP_REQUEST {
  set has_replaced 0
  if { 
    [HTTP::header Accept-Encoding] contains "br"
    && [HTTP::uri] ends_with ".json"
    && [HTTP::uri] ne "/json/knowndevices.json"
   } {
    HTTP::uri "[HTTP::uri].br"
    set has_replaced 1
  }
}

when HTTP_RESPONSE {
  if { $has_replaced } {
    HTTP::header replace "Content-Encoding" "br"
  }
}

 If it works well we can include it in the repository and installation instructions. 

Small fix released in v5.6.8 where the public IP information was shown even when there are no NAT file configured.

Can be downloaded from here:
https://loadbalancing.se/downloads/bigipreport-v5.6.8-beta.zip

Thanks to Tim for the fix!

/Patrik

Update regarding Brotli support

If you do not know what Brotli is you can look at it as a much more efficient way to compress css, json and javascript files. It's a bit slower to compress but on the upshot it's much smaller and using it will speed up the BigIPReport application delivery significantly. The last week we've been focusing on making it easier for people to use Brotli with their BigIPReport installations by creating server templates for different web server vendors.

For those with larger BigIPReport installations I'd really really recommend checking this out. It pretty easy and the gain is high.

Before you start though, please note that the report must run over HTTPS for Brotli to be supported!

Docker/Kubernetes

I've now fixed the nginx configuration in the frontend containers. Pull bigipreport/frontend:v5.6.8 or latest to use the fix. Make sure to empty your cache if you use the tag :latest (not recommended to use this tag btw).

F5 iRules

For those serving BigIPReport via an F5 you can grab an iRule which will do the necessary rewrites to use Brotli. The iRule can be found here:
https://github.com/net-utilities/BigIPReport/blob/master/other/ServeBrotliViaF5/serve-brotli.tcl

IIS

Still stuck with an old Windows installation? First I'd recommend moving to a Linux based installation instead. If this is not possible Tim has been so kind as to share his IIS web.config here:
https://github.com/net-utilities/BigIPReport/blob/master/other/iis/web.config

Apache

For those that uses Apache our superstar Tim has yet again delivered. You can find the Apache config here:
https://github.com/net-utilities/BigIPReport/blob/master/other/apache/brotli.conf

Nginx

If you prefer to run your own Nginx server you can check out the file used in the frontend container:
https://github.com/net-utilities/BigIPReport-Docker/blob/master/frontend/default.conf

Double checking that it works

Using curl this is easy enough. Just run the command below and look for "content-encoding: br":

 curl -I -H "Accept-Encoding: br" https://bigipreport.xip.se/json/pools.json
HTTP/2 200 
server: istio-envoy
date: Wed, 11 May 2022 20:59:36 GMT
content-type: application/json
content-length: 709
last-modified: Wed, 11 May 2022 20:58:19 GMT
etag: "627c236b-2c5"
content-encoding: br
vary: Accept-Encoding
accept-ranges: bytes
x-envoy-upstream-service-time: 0

  You can also double check this by opening up the developer tools of Chrome, head over to the Network tab and refresh your BigIPReport page. If Brotli is used as it should you should see "content-encoding: br" in the response headers. See the screenshot below:

If you run into trouble, please go ahead and head over to our Discord channel:
https://discord.gg/fwEaT7Rf

Have a good one!

Not sure if people are still subscribed to comments here but I'll give it a shot:

Gathering data to recommend people using k8s on how much resources they should allocate. If you are running the report on Kubernetes I'd appreciate it if you could share:

1. How many VIPS/Pools you have
2. Which resource limit have you configured for the data-collector?

Kind regards,
Patrik

Patrik_Jonsson I am Getting the following issue

• SSL Certificated are not being indexed/listed

Error:

2022-06-27 08:27:37 199.96.216.196:Caching certificates
2022-06-27 08:27:39 199.96.216.196:Error loading certificates. {"code":400,"message":"\"recursive\" unexpected argument","errorStack":[],"apiError":26214401} (line 1133)

Please validate that you're running the script with the role Auditor?

kind regards 

Patrik