Back in October at a F5 user group meeting I first heard about F5′s new user tool to aid in supporting BigIP devices. It is designed to be a proactive tool that users can use to resolve issues themselves or identify issues before they become a problem. Lets go through the process of checking this tool out. As with most vendors they have a command that generates everything someone from support would want to see. F5 is no exception, what they have is called a QKView. To generate one login into the GUI of a BigIP device and go to System > Support and this is page that generates a new one. Simply click start with QKview boxed checked (no need for TCPDump in this case) and a few minutes later you have your freshly generated support file. If you have an old one already generated it will instead be prompting you to download it. When the new one is done download it and head on over to iHealth.f5.com. Since this is a support tool you will need a valid support contract to access this site. Once you login you will be presented with a simple screen to upload the new QKview file. Go ahead and upload your file.
After time you will have a number of files listed on the front page. You also notice you can enter F5 case numbers and internal help desk ticket numbers for better tracking of what was going on with that QKview.
As you can see I have files going back to October. Not sure if they have a space limit but so far this is a great archive of your support files so bonus there. Now select the report you want to view and it takes you to a main info page. This is a summary of pretty much everything you would like to know at a glance. At the top it tells you how many issues it has found and classifies them into high, medium and informational. You also can see if a upgrade is recommended or not. The rest of the page is filled with general info such a hardware info, number of servers, nodes, etc configured, the current software running and the license status.
