F5 is a company specializing in networking and security products. F5's load balancer is finding its way into many organizations. This report leverages returned information found in the HTTP protocol allowing us to detect the existence of F5 products, and thus report on the market penetration rate of these products.

The detection of F5 is done via two basic mechanisms:

1. The server signature may return back an indicator of "BigIP".

$ telnet 192.168.1.1 80
Trying 192.168.1.1...
Connected to 192.168.1.1.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://192.168.1.1/
Server: BigIP
Connection: close
Content-Length: 0

Connection closed by foreign host.
$

2. The cookies returned back may indicate a load balancer is in use.

$ telnet 192.168.1.1 80
Trying 192.168.1.1...
Connected to 192.168.1.1.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Location: http://www.myserver.com
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2015 19:28:31 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Length: 151
Set-Cookie: BIGipServerWebCluster_4=1137223872.20480.0000; path=/

Connection closed by foreign host.
$

The following graph and table demonstrates the percentage of IP addresses that are indicating one of the above mentioned signatures. The sample size (the # of distinct IP addresses hosting a web server of some sort) is: 4,101,519.

Date	BigIP Count	IP Address Sample Size	% Share	% Growth
Feb 2023	28,084	4,101,519	0.68	0.62
Jan 2023	28,399	4,173,133	0.68	1.01
Dec 2022	28,568	4,240,552	0.67	0.53
Nov 2022	28,704	4,283,392	0.67	0.56
Oct 2022	28,805	4,322,621	0.67	-1.13
Sep 2022	29,009	4,304,114	0.67	0.07
Aug 2022	29,594	4,394,102	0.67	-0.97
Jul 2022	29,689	4,365,564	0.68	0.19
Jun 2022	30,065	4,429,148	0.68	-0.30
May 2022	30,303	4,450,659	0.68	0.26
Apr 2022	30,603	4,506,461	0.68	-0.29
Mar 2022	30,645	4,499,592	0.68	-0.07
Feb 2022	31,118	4,565,672	0.68	-0.82
Jan 2022	31,517	4,586,420	0.69	-0.65
Dec 2021	31,735	4,588,249	0.69	-0.80
Nov 2021	32,066	4,598,881	0.70	-1.62
Oct 2021	32,597	4,599,474	0.71	0.43
Sep 2021	32,751	4,641,248	0.71	0.16
Aug 2021	32,918	4,672,408	0.70	-1.15
Jul 2021	33,303	4,672,747	0.71	-1.00
Jun 2021	33,662	4,676,004	0.72	-0.87
May 2021	33,913	4,669,815	0.73	-0.57
Apr 2021	34,226	4,686,056	0.73	-0.85
Mar 2021	34,593	4,696,053	0.74	0.46
Feb 2021	34,741	4,738,068	0.73	1.15
Jan 2021	34,892	4,813,337	0.72	0.23
Dec 2020	35,102	4,853,649	0.72	-0.72
Nov 2020	35,453	4,866,780	0.73	1.03
Oct 2020	35,829	4,969,178	0.72	-0.13
Sep 2020	36,141	5,005,869	0.72	2.70
Aug 2020	35,973	5,117,259	0.70	-0.01
Jul 2020	36,074	5,131,234	0.70	0.54
Jun 2020	36,272	5,187,418	0.70	0.46
May 2020	36,398	5,229,623	0.70	0.61
Apr 2020	36,807	5,320,769	0.69	0.85
Mar 2020	37,088	5,406,728	0.69	0.48
Feb 2020	37,106	5,435,313	0.68	N/A

This report was added to our monthly roster of reports on July 1st, 2015, with backdated reports dating back to July 2002 added on June 23rd, 2015.