Mercury Topaz
F5 APPLICATION READY NETWORK GUIDE
MERCURY TOPAZ
Integrating Mercury’s Topaz and F5 Networks Solutions
Executive Summary
With the disparity between different applications in the network, enterprises are searching for ways to easily and effectively monitor and manage
the network as a whole. With Mercury Topaz™, combined with F5 Networks’ iControl API, management of all aspects of the network becomes a
secure, highly available, integrated solution.
Through F5’s iControl® API (Application Programming Interface), F5 integrates Mercury’s Topaz application performance management solutions
with its Application Delivery Networking products to receive information, such as alerts and performance data, to affect traffi c management
decisions, and to provide maximum application uptime and performance.
Challenges
In order for enterprises to deliver the highest Quality of Service through their site, they must be able to effectively identify, isolate and diagnose
problems when they arise. Ensuring performance requires the ability to gather data from a variety of devices and applications, and present that data
in a useful fashion so it can be acted upon. Application and traffi c management are key components of performance. But until recently, any changes
to traffi c management to improve performance were unable to incorporate the range of information gathered by the Topaz solution. Manual
intervention was also required when a change was needed.
The goal was to build a solution that would ultimately help organizations reduce costs by helping them identify, diagnose, resolve, or avoid
performance issues before their customers ever experienced a problem.
Solution
By integrating Topaz and F5 products, the Topaz solution is now able to use information it gathers to automatically adjust the traffi c management
confi guration to respond to specifi c events. This increases performance, reduces the instances of manual intervention, and creates a more robust
management solution for the customer. This integration provides more intuitive network management, giving enterprises increased ability to
manage performance and a higher degree of control over traffi c management.
F5 Networks’ BIG-IP® Local Traffi c Manager continuously monitors network devices to
About Topaz
ensure availability and performance, routing incoming queries to the most available resource.
Advanced health checking capabilities provide increased throughput, reduced latency and
Mercury’s Topaz was designed to
overall improved site stability in a highly secure environment.
meet organization’s application
The key to the solution is F5’s iControl; the industry’s fi rst open application program interface
performance management
(APM) needs. By using Topaz,
(API) for a comprehensive suite of application traffi c management products. Made available as
organizations can monitor the
a free SDK, the iControl architectural approach overcomes the greatest challenges of integration
performance of their applications,
- making it quick and easy to create intercommunication between 3rd party applications and
receive alerts when issues arise,
the network via F5’s products.
identify problems and diagnose
their cause. It is the only solution
that measures end-user experiences
About F5
24x7 and correlates performance
F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking. F5 provides solutions
issues to their cause in the Web
that make applications secure, fast and available for everyone, helping organizations get the
infrastructure - inside and outside
most out of their investment. By adding intelligence and manageability into the network to
the fi rewall and in the application.
offl oad applications, F5 optimizes applications and allows them to work faster and consume
As a result, organizations can
fewer resources. F5’s extensible architecture intelligently integrates application optimization,
ensure users are receiving solid
protects the application and the network, and delivers application reliability—all on one
performance while quickly
universal platform. Over 10,000 organizations and service providers worldwide trust F5 to keep
resolving any infrastructure
their applications running. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington with offi ces
problems.
worldwide. For more information, go to www.f5.com.
