F5 introduced new solutions to provide enhanced application visibility and control throughout the application lifecycle.
These solutions give customers end-to-end visibility into the health and performance of applications, along with integrated traffic, security, and API management controls to take action based on those insights, surfacing new ways to lower operational overhead and achieve faster time to market.
“Today, nearly every organization is accelerating their digital transformation efforts, but they are flying blind, as they lack visibility into how many applications they’re running, let alone how each app is performing or if those apps are secure,” said Kara Sprague, EVP and General Manager of BIG-IP at F5. “Applications, traditional and modern, derive many advantages in being distributed throughout on-prem, cloud, and microservice environments—but this often fragments visibility and enterprise-wide control. F5 empowers app owners, developers, and IT operators with the telemetry and closed-loop automation required to effectively troubleshoot, identify threat areas, and deliver new digital capabilities in minutes, not days or weeks.”
F5 is introducing three complementary offerings to deliver superior visibility, actionable analytics, and automated traffic management and security across an organization’s entire app portfolio. F5’s BIG-IP and BIG-IQ solutions offer health, security, and performance analytics and deep troubleshooting tools for NetOps and SecOps teams. NGINX Controller complements this with additional capabilities for AppDev and DevOps teams, providing API-driven visibility, analytics, and controls via ADC, API management, and application security services running on NGINX Plus. Through integrations with BIG-IQ, NGINX Controller, and other F5 offerings—as well as a vast array of third-party integrations—F5 Beacon aggregates telemetry from across the application data path to offer a complete end-to-end view of applications as well as a holistic, enterprise-wide view of an organization’s application portfolio for use by application owners, IT operations professionals, and line-of-business managers.
Specifically, the company is introducing:
- F5 Beacon – A new SaaS offering, Beacon delivers the platform for true end-to-end application visibility, providing actionable insights to facilitate troubleshooting and decision-making for application owners and IT operations professionals. Beacon ingests telemetry data streams from multiple sources such as BIG-IP, NGINX, and F5 Cloud Services, as well as third-party technologies to provide an end-to-end view of application topologies, dependencies, user experience, health, and performance. Additionally, Beacon Insights, through an open and extensible platform, help solve the challenges associated with end-to-end anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and security visibility and compliance. Beacon is differentiated from other solutions in the monitoring and analytics space in that it is application-centric, orienting data and analytics around the unit of an application, enabling organizations to focus efforts on improving end-to-end application performance and end-user experience. Beacon is further differentiated in that it accomplishes this without requiring significant integration work; it surfaces rich insights on end-to-end application performance by tapping into the telemetry data from F5’s broad portfolio of application delivery and security offerings (including NGINX), which are used by half of the world’s applications, as well as a growing number of third-party offerings.
- BIG-IQ 7.1 – As the most comprehensive central management, orchestration, and analytics solution for F5’s BIG-IP app services, BIG-IQ capabilities include app services management, security-specific dashboards, and tight integrations with the F5 Automation Toolchain. With BIG-IQ, operations teams gain visibility into the overall health, status, and performance of their BIG-IP app delivery and security services from an application-centric dashboard. This latest release enables visibility of legacy application services, streamlines management workflows, and adds new security management functionality.
- NGINX Controller 3.4 – NGINX’s application delivery and performance platform offers a broad set of services for load balancing, analytics, and API management in and across clouds. With an application-centric approach, this version of NGINX Controller enhances per-app analytics and improves declarative API capabilities, ensuring NetOps, DevOps, and other teams can manage tasks across the entire application lifecycle. As a result, enterprises can speed time to market with collaborative workflows integrated into CI/CD pipelines via API calls or the updated GUI. Through NGINX Controller, teams can simplify deployment, configuration, and monitoring for NGINX Plus, whether it’s deployed as a load balancer, API gateway, or a proxy in a microservices environment.
These three offerings are designed to integrate capabilities from across the application data path—the pathway through which application traffic flows to reach an end user—helping customers:
- Gain End-to-End Visibility of Dynamic App Functions for Optimized Digital Experiences: Comprehensive app visibility has proved elusive in light of several factors, including the proliferation of myriad monitoring and analytics tools. These monitoring and analytics tools are typically decoupled from the underlying application services that perform critical functions in delivering and securing the application. Ultimately, what’s been missing—and what F5 Beacon delivers—is an easy way to harmonize different levels of visibility and analytics around these important functions and across traditional and modern applications deployed in on-premises and multi-cloud environments. App owners and IT operations professionals can get a holistic view of app health and risk across their application portfolio and drive improvements in SLAs such as availability, responsiveness, and mean-time-to-resolution through a granular mapping of the end-to-end application topology and associated application delivery and security services.
- Combine Visibility and Controls to Improve Business Outcomes: Unique to F5 is the ability to combine different dimensions of visibility and control throughout the app deployment and delivery lifecycle. For instance, BIG-IQ offers visibility into and management and orchestration of the BIG-IP application services footprint, most commonly used for load balancing, firewall, access management, and app security for traditional applications spanning multi-cloud environments. NGINX Controller does the same for NGINX Plus deployments, most commonly used as the web server, ingress controller, API gateway, and load balancing solution in modern, container-native applications. F5 Beacon provides end-to-end application-centric visibility across traditional and modern apps, combining telemetry from both BIG-IP and NGINX Plus footprints with agents such as Telegraf, webhook APIs, and a growing number of third-party ecosystem integrations.
- Simplify the Deployment of Advanced Controls for SaaS and Container-Based Apps: With organizations ramping up their digital initiatives, the world is also shifting toward new application architectures relying on SaaS solutions and microservices that are quickly spun up in containers and then securely connected and authenticated via APIs. As enterprises look to deploy technologies like containers orchestrated by Kubernetes, F5 is introducing a set of solutions to provide needed visibility for traffic management, API management, and app security. Designed to run natively in clouds and containers, NGINX Controller provides deep insights into the performance of modern app architecture components through telemetry and integrations with NGINX Plus.
F5 Beacon, BIG-IQ 7.1, and NGINX Controller 3.4 are all generally available today.
The Latest
In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...
In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...
Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ...
Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...
Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...
Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...
The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...
The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...
In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...