How to Add a Data Collection Device to your BIG-IQ Cluster

Gathering and analyzing data helps organizations make intelligent decisions about their IT infrastructure. You may need a data collection device (DCD) to collect BIG-IP data so you can manage that device with BIG-IQ. BIG-IQ is a platform that manages your devices and the services they deliver. Let’s look at how to discover and add a data collection device in BIG-IQ v5.2. You can add a new data collection device to your BIG-IQ cluster so that you can start managing it using the BIG-IP device data.

In addition to Event and Alert Log data, you can view and manage statistical data for your devices. From licensing to policies, traffic to security, you’ll see it all from a single pane of glass.

But you need a DCD to do that.

So, we start by logging in to a BIG-IQ.

Then, under the System tab, go to BIG-IQ Data Collection and under that, click BIG-IQ Data Collection Devices.

The current DCD screen shows no devices in this cluster. To add a DCD, click Add.

This brings us to the DCD Properties screen. For Management Address field, we add the management IP address of the BIG-IP/DCD we want to manage. We’ll then add the Admin username and password for the device. For Data Collection IP Address, we put the transport address which is usually the internal Self-IP address of the DCD and click Add.

The process can take a little while as the BIG-IQ authenticates with the BIG-IQ DCD and adds it to the BIG-IQ configuration. But once complete, you can see the devices has been added successfully.

Now you’ll notice that the DCD has been added but there are no Services at this point. To add Services, click Add Services.

In this instance, we’re managing a BIG-IP with multiple services including Access Policies so we’re going to activate the Access services. The listener address already has the management address of the DCD populated so we’ll simply click Activate. Once activated, you can see that it is Active.

When we go back to the Data Collection Devices page, we can see that the Access Services have been added and the activation worked.

Congrats! You’ve added a Data Collection Device! You can also watch a video demo of How to Add a data collection device to your BIG-IQ cluster.

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Related:

• Lightboard Lesson: What is BIG-IQ?

Lightboard Lessons: What is BIG-IQ?

In this Lightboard Lesson, I light up many of the tasks you can do with BIG-IQ, BIG-IQ centralizes management, licensing, monitoring, and analytics for your dispersed BIG-IP infrastructure. If you have more than a few F5 BIG-IP's within your organization, managing devices as separate entities will become an administrative bottleneck and slow application deployments.  Deploying cloud applications, you're potentially managing thousands of systems and having to deal with traditionally monolithic administrative functions is a simple no-go. 

Enter BIG-IQ.



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• What is BIG-IQ?

The IoT Ready Platform

Over the last couple months, in between some video coverage for events, I've been writing a series of IoT stories. From the basic What are These "Things”? and IoT Influence on Society to the descriptive IoT Effect on Applications and the IoT Ready Infrastructure. I thought it only fair to share how F5 can play within an IoT infrastructure.

Because F5 application services share a common control plane—the F5 platform—we’ve simplified the process of deploying and optimizing IoT application delivery services. With the elastic power of Software Defined Application Services (SDAS), you can rapidly provision IoT application services across the data center and into cloud computing environments, reducing the time and costs associated with deploying new applications and architectures.

The beauty of SDAS is that it can provide the global services to direct the IoT devices to the most appropriate data center or hybrid cloud depending on the request, context, and application health. Customers, employees, and the IoT devices themselves receive the most secure and fastest experience possible.

F5's high-performance services fabric supports traditional and emerging underlay networks. It can deployed a top traditional IP and VLAN-based networks, works with SDN overlay networks using NVGRE or VXLAN (as well as a variety of less well-known overlay protocols) and integrates with SDN network fabrics such as those from Cisco/Insieme, Arista and BigSwitch among others.

Hardware, Software or Cloud

The services fabric model enables consolidation of services onto a common platform that can be deployed on hardware, software or in the cloud. This reduces operational overhead by standardizing management as well as deployment processes to support continuous delivery efforts. By sharing service resources and leveraging fine-grained multi-tenancy, the cost of individual services is dramatically reduced, enabling all IoT applications - regardless of size - to take advantage of services that are beneficial to their security, reliability and performance.

The F5 platform:

• Provides the network security to protect against inbound attacks
• Offloads SSL to improve the performance of the application servers
• Not only understands the application but also know when it is having problems
• Ensures not only the best end user experience but also quick and efficient data replication

F5 Cloud solutions can automate and orchestrate the deployment of IoT application delivery services across both traditional and cloud infrastructures while also managing the dynamic redirection of workloads to the most suitable location. These application delivery services ensure predictable IoT experiences, replicated security policy, and workload agility.

F5 BIG-IQ™ Cloud can federate management of F5 BIG-IP® solutions across both traditional and cloud infrastructures, helping organizations deploy and manage IoT delivery services in a fast, consistent, and repeatable manner, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. In addition, BIG-IQ Cloud integrates or interfaces with existing cloud orchestration engines such as VMware vCloud Director to streamline the overall process of deploying applications.

Extend, Scale - and Secure

F5 Cloud solutions offer a rapid Application Delivery Network provisioning solution, drastically reducing the lead times for expanding IoT delivery capabilities across data centers, be they private or public. As a result, organizations can efficiently:

• Extend data centers to the cloud to support IoT deployments
• Scale IoT applications beyond the data center when required.
• Secure and accelerate IoT connections to the cloud

For maintenance situations, organizations no longer need to manually redirect traffic by configuring applications. Instead, IoT applications are proactively redirected to an alternate data center prior to maintenance.

For continuous DDoS protection, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection is a service delivered via the F5 Silverline cloud-based platform that provides detection and mitigation to stop even the largest of volumetric DDoS attacks from reaching your IoT network.  

The BIG-IP platform is application and location agnostic, meaning the type of application or where the application lives really does not matter. As long as you tell the BIG-IP platform where to find the IoT application, the BIG-IP platform will deliver it.

Bringing it all together, F5 Synthesis enables cloud and application providers as well as mobile network operators the architectural framework necessary to ensure the performance, reliability and security of IoT applications.

Connected devices are here to stay—forcing us to move forward into this brave new world where almost everything generates data traffic. While there’s much to consider, proactively addressing these challenges and adopting new approaches for enabling an IoT-ready network will help organizations chart a clearer course toward success.

An IoT-ready environment enables IT to begin taking advantage of this societal shift without a wholesale rip-and-replace of existing technology. It also provides the breathing room IT needs to ensure that the coming rush of connected devices does not cripple the infrastructure. This process ensures benefits will be realized without compromising on the operational governance required to ensure availability and security of IoT network, data, and application resources. It also means IT can manage IoT services instead than boxes.

However an IoT ready infrastructure is constructed, it is a transformational journey for both IT and the business. It is not something that should be taken lightly or without a long-term strategy in place. When done properly, F5-powered IoT ready infrastructure can bring significant benefits to an organization and its people.

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Related:

• The Digital Dress Code
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• What are These "Things”?
• IoT Influence on Society
• IoT Effect on Applications
• CloudExpo 2014: The DNS of Things
• Intelligent DNS Animated Whiteboard
• The Internet of Me, Myself & I

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VMware PEX 2014: NSX Integration Demo (Cano solo)

Charlie Cano, Biz Dev Sr Solution Architect, demonstrates how F5 services can be deployed and configured from within NSX into the environment. This integration provides access to everything available on the BIG-IP platform. Deploy to physical or virtual environments with the REST based API BIG-IQ, the single point of integration for all your BIG-IP devices.

 

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VMworld2013 - That's a Wrap

Peter Silva wraps it up from his day trip to San Francisco for VMworld2013. Special thanks to Frank Strobel, Charlie Cano, Nathan Pearce, Simon Hamilton-Wilkes along with cinematographers Christine and Olivia.

 

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VMworld2013 - vCenter Orchestrator

I meet with Simon Hamilton-Wilkes, F5 Principal Solution Engineer about vCenter Orchestrator and how F5 integrates with it. Ease, automation and accuracy.

 

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• In 5 Minutes or Less - PCoIP Proxy for VMware Horizon View
• F5 VMware Solutions
• F5 Offers Customer-Focused Activities at VMworld 2013
• Automating application delivery with BIG-IP and VMware vCenter Orchestrator
• VMware Virtualizing the Network on its Way to the Software Defined Data Center
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Connect with Peter:	Connect with F5:

Interop2013: BIG-IQ Cloud

I meet with Dan Kim, F5 Product Manager for Management Solutions, to learn more about BIG-IQ, BIG-IQ Cloud and the benefits of a management system that can span multiple cloud environments. BIG-IQ Cloud automates and orchestrates the deployment of application delivery services across both traditional and cloud infrastructures.

 

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