A Little Love for Ops - the All New BIG-IP Operations Guide

[JRahm]

Update: Download version 1.5 of the operations guide now from AskF5.

A couple years in the making, the long sought after F5 BIG-IP TMOS: Operations Guide, hence force called the "Manual of Operational Greatness," has arrived! In addition to the great documentation on how to design and deliver traffic solutions with F5 gear, AskF5 and DevCentral have for years had a collection of tribal knowledge on many of the operational tasks an organization faces in managing our gear. This manual contains all that goodness and more. The opening sections of the manual start with checklists for maintenance and upgrades, and then also some best practices for daily, weekly, monthly, etc tasks to consider working into your operational planning.

Some of the highlights in the manual include:

• Hardware details and diagnostics
• Viprion best practices
• Backup and recovery - this is far too often overlooked until the minute you need it. Don't make that mistake!
• Logging details - there are some gems in here. There are many options in how you log on the system locally and what methods to utilize in a centralized strategy.
• Caching - this section breaks down the BIG-IP cache, the acceleration cache, and DNS caching.
• APIs - a general overview with linkage to our various system APIs (iRules, iControl, iApps, etc..)
• Security - mailing lists for open vulnerabilities are covered here, as well as basic system protect best practices and auditing insights.

There's far more to meet your operational needs here, people, so don't delay. Go get this thing and read up!

Update - If you have feedback for the guide, please take the survey!

[Keith_Fuller]

Thanks! There is a lot of need for this guide and we finally have one.

[Laudec]

Fantastic job on this guide! Might be a little bit too early for this, but would love to see one for ASM and APM 🙂

[Walter_Kacynski]

+1 for APM

[StephanManthey]

Hi Jason, the new operations guide is pretty cool. Nice job and thanks a lot for posting. I started writing a similar document 18 months ago (in german language - still in draft and stuck at page 130 right now) and share it with my clients. Very similar layout, btw. Lots of references as well to the fantastic AskF5 Knowledgebase. There is actually some overlap but there is a lot of things I wasn´t aware of yet. TMOS - a moving target. 🙂 Keep up developing this kind of docs. It´s really worth the effort! Thanks again & kind regards to the authors, Stephan

[LEON_LI_38034]

Look forward to ASM & APM

[hooleylist]

Also check out the LTM/GTM operations guide published in Feb: https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/f5-ltm-gtm-operations-guide-1-0.html

[Saravanan_M_K]

APM operations guide is out now: https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_apm/manuals/product/f5-apm-operations-guide.html