F5 Beacon empowers you to achieve full visibility across your application landscape, obtain app insights and business intelligence, and make fast, impactful, and better-informed decisions. With the Beacon Insight Engine, you can leverage pre-built insights or create your own custom insights. Beacon also integrates with many types of deployments across hybrid and multi-cloud environments—and provides a rich set of app stats in a simple, easy-to-consume SaaS model.
In addition to app visibility and analytics, Beacon is an open, extensible platform delivering powerful app insights. Pre-built app insights provide intelligence on a specific line of business or practice. Beacon includes easy-to-consume security, operational, and cost insights. You can also create your own customized insights based on unique data sets and requirements to empower decision making and reduce time to execution and resolution.
The Insight feature within F5 Beacon is a centralized portal to get useful information about your application portfolio. Insights are divided into three categories Security, Operations and Cost.
Security Insights:
- Which applications are encrypted?
- How many applications are actively blocking threats?
- Which apps are protected by a WAF?
Operational Insights:
- Which apps are at risk of service disruption?
- What percent of time was my app available?
- What was the average response time for my apps?
- Why is my app down?
Cost insights:
- How many apps are deployed elastically?
- Where are my idle and underutilized resources?
- Which environments are using what percent of my budget?
Beacon has two types of insights, built-in and custom.
Built-in insights are provided by F5 Networks and made available within the service. Such insights include the ‘F5 Assets and Inventory’ insight detailing F5 assets acting as Beacon sources and the ‘F5 App Protection’ insight detailing security findings for BIG-IQ HTTP applications. Built-in insights are updated automatically and cannot be edited or deleted. The built-in insights appear only when relevant data exists (e.g. ‘F5 Assets and Inventory’ appears when F5 sources exist).
Custom insights are based on analyzing any raw data stored in F5 Beacon or outside of it. These insights can be created either via the portal or API.
Create custom insights
The following is an example of creating custom insights for BIG-IP and NGNIX.
BIG-IP Insight
Step 1: Login to Beacon and navigate to Beacon>Insights and click Create.
Step 2: Select the following options and click Run.
- Source Type: bigip-system
- Metric: systemCpuUsage
- Filter: Source <your BIG-IP hostname>
- Functions: Mean
Step 3: View the system status in the graph section.
Step 4: In the Properties section, provide the following and click Save & Close.
- Title: BigIPCPUUsage
- Severity: Critical
NGNIX Insight
Step 5: Navigate to Beacon>Insights and click Create.
Step 6: Select the following options and click Run.
- Source Type: ngnix
- Metric: active
- Filter: Host <your NGNIX hostname>
- Functions: Mean
Step 7: View the system status in the graph section.
Step 8: In the Properties section, provide the following and click Save & Close.
- Title: AcitveNGINX
- Severity: Informational
This completes Insight creation on Beacon.
Summary:
This article provided introduction to Insight creation on Beacon.
Next Steps:
This article is part of Visibility and Orchestration with F5 Series. Please check out other articles in this series.