F5 BIG-IQ provides a central point of control for BIG-IP physical and virtual appliances and for the solutions that run on them. It simplifies management, helps ensure compliance, and gives you the tools you need to deliver your applications securely and effectively

BIG-IQ reduces the administrative overhead of managing your BIG-IP estate, whether BIG-IP services are deployed on F5 systems (including F5 rSeries and F5 VELOS) or as Virtual Editions. It includes deep visibility and intuitive management workflows for BIG-IP policies, licenses, SSL certificates, images, and device configurations. It also offers holistic visibility and control of BIG-IP application delivery and security services.

BIG-IQ provides extensive analytics, fine-grained Roles-Based Access Control (RBAC), automation workflows, F5-supported service templates, REST API endpoints, and integrations with third-party tools—like analytics, CI/CD, and automation and orchestration tools—to give you an end-to-end BIG-IP management solution.

BIG-IQ supports the following F5 modules:

• BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
• BIG-IP Advanced WAF (WAF)
• BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)
• BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator
• BIG-IP DDoS Hybrid Defender)
• BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM)
• F5 Secure Web Gateway Services
• BIG-IP DNS

BIG-IQ manages BIG-IP VEs running in Azure or other cloud environments, as well as BIG-IP services deployed on F5 systems including F5 rSeries, F5 VELOS and earlier generation platforms. BIG-IQ is ideal for organizations that require central management and automation of F5 devices and modules, license management of BIG-IP, and central reporting and alerting on application availability, performance, and security.

The Azure virtual machine guest environment for the BIG-IQ Virtual Edition (VE), at minimum, must include:

•   2 Virtual network adapter cards (NICs)

•   A 64-bit instance with at least 4 virtual cores (up to 16 are supported in this release)

•   At least 16 GB RAM (64 GB has been tested, F5 recommends at least 2 GB per virtual core)

The BIG-IQ instance must be deployed using PowerShell to create a 2nd NIC.

More information at:

BIG-IQ Centralized Management and Microsoft Azure: Setup

Annual support contracts may be purchased separately for BYOL offerings from F5 Technical Support Services.

Obtain your 30 day free trial for BIG-IP Cloud Edition here.