Reference: Application service status

You can monitor your application services for health issues and active alerts to mitigate potential impact on the application services. Evaluating application service data provides insights, based on its service type. If you identify an issue with your services you can edit your application service, or objects connected to your application service, such as policies and profiles.

For more information about application endpoint observability, see Reference: Application endpoint data metrics.
For information about creating or managing applications, see How to: Manage applications using BIG-IP Next Central Manager and FAST templates. For more information about filtering application service information in the dashboard, see filtering application services

Application service health

The health of an application shown in the My Application Services dashboard is a cumulative calculation of the statuses of each application’s pool and pool members.

Application service health is based on the following:

  • Changes in traffic patterns.

  • Changes in pool member (endpoint) status. Status is either offline or unknown.

The following describes why an application service is assigned a specific health status when observing applications in the application dashboard:

Status Description
Good All pool members attached to an application service are online.*
Moderate One or more pool members attached to the application service are offline or disabled. At least one pool member is online.
Moderate One or more pool members attached to the application service has unexpected changes in traffic trends.
Critical All pool members are either offline and/or disabled, or the pool member status is unknown.

* In some cases the application service manager might intentionally disable all endpoint monitors (pool members in a pool). This would place the pool in an offline or disabled status, but does not affect the application’s health. Therefore, the application will still be in ‘good’ health.

Application service alerts and status

The My Application Services dashboard provides a total number of active alerts to all your applications. Active alerts indicate events impacting your applications’ health status. An event that impacts your application health is determined by status changes to your application’s: virtual servers, pools, and pool members, or traffic to the pool member.

The severity of an alert is determined by whether the event partially/potentially impacts performance (warning) or if the application service is unable to reach an entire pool of pool members (critical). See pool member alerts for information about how BIG-IP Next determines alert severity.

Pool member alerts

The basis of all alerts comes from the ability for BIG-IP Next Central Manager to recognize a pool member as online or offline.

When BIG-IP Next identifies a pool member as offline or disabled, this triggers an alert. The alert severity depends on whether the pool member checks are consistent.

The following are the different pool member alerts, their severity (status), and the condition that impacts the pool member’s status.

Status Condition
Warning The pool member does not consistently respond when BIG-IP Next checks its status.
Critical The pool member is confirmed offline.

Pool status

The basis of all alerts comes from the status(s) of the client or server pool members in a pool. The pool status is displayed on application service topology.

When BIG-IP Next identifies a pool member as offline or disabled, this triggers an alert. The alert severity depends on why some or all pool member in a pool are offline or disabled. The status of the pool member affects the health of its pool and application service(s).

The following are the different alerts of the pool members in the pools, their severity (status), and the condition that impacts the pool’s status.

Status Alert Condition
Warning At least one pool member is offline One or more pool members are offline or disabled, but not all. At least one pool member is online, or all other pool member health monitors were turned off.
Critical All pool members are offline and/or disabled No pool members are available because they are all offline, disabled, or a combination of the two:
  1. Offline: A pool member's health monitor cannot be reached by BIG-IP Next, and the pool member status is unknown.
  2. Disabled: A pool member's health monitor was disabled by an application manager.
Critical All pool members were deleted/the pool is empty The pool's endpoints were all deleted or there are no endpoints identified in a pool.

Virtual Server Alerts

Virtual servers consist of one or more collections of pools. Changes in the status of the pool in a virtual server impact the status of the alert. A collection of pools are attached to a virtual server. A virtual server has one or more pools created for services such as load balancing, or WAF protection. Each application service includes at least one virtual server.

The following are the virtual server alerts, their severity (status), and the condition that impacts the status.

Status Condition
Warning When the response error rate exceeds 0.01% and one or more pools in a virtual server are offline, but not all. At least one pool is online, and/or all other pools were disabled.
Critical A Vritual server status is critical when the response error rate exceeds 0.05%. All pool members are offline, disabled, or a combination of the two:
  1. Offline: A pool member cannot be reached by BIG-IP Next, and the status is unknown.
  2. Disabled: A pool member was disabled by an application manager.
Critical All pools were deleted/the virtual server is empty