Configure Load Balancers

This topic explains how to configure Application Discovery to discover traffic in an environment where load balancers are present.

Supported Load Balancer types

The following Load Balancer types are supported:

  • F5 Big IP

  • Citrix NetScaler

  • A10 AX

  • Radware Alteon

  • KEMP LoadMaster

  • Others – any Load Balancer that supports SNMP Read Access can be queried by Application Discovery. The MIB describing the SNMP structure is required to set up the correct configuration and access the Load Balancer configuration. See Configuring other Load Balancer types .

Load Balancer discovery

If a Load Balancer is used to group multiple servers as a single Virtual Server, or other types of server clustering is used, these server clusters should be defined in Application Discovery.

Load balancer discovery is based on accessing the Load Balancer via SNMP, reading its configuration, and defining clusters in Application Discovery accordingly.

To discover/define Load Balancers

To automatically extract load balancing configuration for any of the supported Load Balancers:

Do the following:

  1. Verify that the Load Balancer installation accepts SNMP client access from the Application Discovery Server IP address with Read permissions.

  1. Go to the Configuration/Clusters menu in Application Discovery Web GUI.

  2. Click Discover from Load Balancer. You will need to supply the Load Balancer server name as well as the community string.

To manually define server clusters:

Do the following:

  1. Go to the Configuration/Clusters menu in Application Discovery Web GUI.

  2. Click New.

Configuring other Load Balancer types

Any Load Balancer that supports SNMP Read Access can be queried by Application Discovery. The MIB describing the SNMP structure is required to set up the correct configuration and access the Load Balancer configuration. The configuration is done in tbl_load_balancer_types in the Application Discovery database. A new entry with the correct XML description of the load balancer configuration fields should be inserted into this table.

To access the Load Balancer, the IP address or server name used for the Load Balancer management should be specified, along with the credentials to log in.

The credentials can use SNMPv2 or SNMPv3, depending on the supported version by the Load Balancer. For SNMPv2, only a community string should be supplied. For SNMPv3, a username with two passwords should be supplied (it is possible to use the same password).

Application Discovery supports Load balancers with the following SNMP agent access details:

  • Authentication type: MD5

  • Authentication password must be at least 8 characters

  • Privacy protocol: DES

Auto refreshing cluster configurations

If the Auto Refresh option is selected, then the Load Balancer configuration is refreshed daily, and cluster data is updated with new clusters, removed clusters, and updates to existing clusters.