F5 Beacon Portal User's Guide

F5 Beacon, an SaaS offering, provides visibility and actionable insights into the health and performance of applications. Driven by an application-centric approach, F5 Beacon empowers leaders and app owners with the right set of visibility, monitoring, and analytics across their entire application portfolio.

Beacon offers:

• End-to-end app visibility:
  • Account for all applications irrespective of where they are deployed
  • Review the health status of applications
  • Gain operations, security, and cost insights
• Single pane of glass, where telemetry data from different sources can be fused together to provide actionable insights:
  • F5 portfolio of products and services
  • Telegraf: a plugin-driven server agent for collecting and reporting metrics from 170+ sources
  • Fluentd: a plugin-driven data collector to gather metrics from log data
  • Other sources: Datadog - Synthetics service and UptimeRobot leveraging our open declarative APIs and Webhooks (see Ingest API)
• Synthetic testing to track availability and performance characteristics for HTTP endpoints
• Integration into common DevOps toolchains (such as Ansible)
• Flexible application modeling that aligns with existing environments and standards

Access to Beacon

1. Go to https://beacon.f5.com/
2. Create an F5 Cloud Services Account
3. Subscribe to Beacon

Work with Beacon

F5 Beacon tracks the health and status of different application components, defines application structure, and allows users to create customized dashboards to get a global view of their applications.

The main entities in Beacon are:

• Source - endpoints sending telemetry data to Beacon; for example, BIG-IP as a source sends stats (status, metrics, etc.) on virtual servers
• Application - Beacon’s representation of an application, depicted as a tree structure composed of components
• Component - a single entity in the application tree structure with health derived from one or more metrics and/or dependencies on other components
• Monitor - a synthetic test to monitor uptime and performance for HTTP endpoints and DNS lookups
• Widget - a visualization module that utilizes Beacon data to provide insight on the application portfolio
• Dashboard - a customizable grouping of widgets
• Insight - Pertinent information about the application portfolio. Insights are categorized as cost, operational, or security. Custom insights are created by customers via API or the portal. Built-in insights are provided by F5.
• Metric - A time data series that is defined by source, list of filters and a single field​
  To utilize Beacon, users configure endpoints (i.e. sources) to ingest telemetry data to Beacon, create monitors, onboard applications, create insights and create dashboards

To utilize Beacon, users configure endpoints (i.e. sources) to ingest telemetry data to Beacon, create monitors, onboard applications, create insights and create dashboards to help capture all these insights.

Beacon API and Postman collection

Login & Navigate to F5 Beacon

1. Login to the F5 Beacon portal at https://beacon.f5.com
2. Click the Beacon icon in the Cloud Services navigation menu on the left.

Beacon has the following menu items:

• Application Landscape - manage and view applications in a list or plotted on a map
• Dashboard View - view configured dashboards
• Insights - view built-in and custom insights by category and severity
• Dashboard Management - create, modify and delete dashboards
• Configuration - configure sources to ingest telemetry data for applications

Configuration

F5 Beacon offers a single pane of glass, where telemetry data from different sources can be fused together to provide actionable insights.  Telemetry data can be ingested from different sources, leveraging built-in integrations such as F5 BIG-IP, F5 BIG-IQ and many more.

For the latest set of integrations refer to Configuration > Integrations.

• Add a New Source
• Onboard an Application
• Create Application
• Display Application on the Map
• Filter by Location Using the Map
• View Application Details
• Edit Application
• Set Component Health Settings

Monitors

• HTTP monitors
• SSL checks
• DNS monitors
• Create monitors

Dashboards

Dashboards are used to visualize the current and past state of the application portfolio. A set of widgets is provided, each with specific visualization, such as application health history. Widgets can be added to dashboards to create customized views.

The Dashboard Management page is used to create, modify and delete dashboards. The Dashboard View page is used to display dashboards.

• Add a dashboard
• View dashboards
• Edit dashboards
• Delete dashboards

Insights

The Insights page within F5 Beacon is a centralized location to get insightful information about your application portfolio

• Create custom insights via the portal
• Associate custom insights to a Beacon application via the portal
• Create custom insights via API

Metrics

Beacon provides the ability to store metrics and subsequently query them via the portal or API to generate custom insights.

• Integrate Telegraf with Beacon
• Integrate Fluentd with Beacon