Hi,
I’m interested in how the BigIP can help me with sorry pages, ie. showing content even when the application is down. Are there any recommended ways to do this?
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You’re on the right track here! For an optimal customer experience you should make sure to give your visitors information throughout all application states, and that includes applications being down.
As with most things in the F5 world there’s more than one way to solve this. Most common ones is probably HTTP fallback hosts and iRules.
HTTP fallback hosts will redirect users when the F5 is unable to serve a request. The issue with a redirect is that the location bar in the browser is changed and hitting refresh would just refresh the destination page. Information from the original request is likely lost (unless some logic is implemented on the application side to handle this) which could make it hard to troubleshoot why it happened.
My preferred way instead is to use iRules to respond with HTML content. Benefit being that the client stays at the resource they wanted to visit so refreshing will eventually take them to their original destination. With an iRule you could also who internal users more detailed information that could help with troubleshooting.
Hope that helped!
/Patrik
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