Operations teams have no shortage of monitoring tools. What they've been short on is clarity — a fast, readable answer to the question: what should I fix first, and how long will it take?
F5 is trying to solve that with F5 Insight for ADSP, announced today at AppWorld 2026 in Las Vegas. It's now generally available for BIG-IP, with support for F5 NGINX and Distributed Cloud Services planned through 2026 and into 2027.
Insight is built on top of what F5 customers were already using — an internal tool called the Application Study Tool, or AST, that teams had quietly been running for years. F5 is now making it an officially supported, AI-driven product.
From Dashboards to Actionable Narratives
The core idea behind F5 Insight is straightforward: instead of presenting raw metrics and charts that require a BIG-IP expert to interpret, it uses natural language — powered by MCP integration and compatible large language models — to tell every application owner what's happening with their apps and what to do about it.
Shawn Wormke, SVP of Product Management at F5, described it this way during an interview at AppWorld:
"It gives them step-by-step instructions to resolve whether they're performance challenges, security risks, or outages. It allows operation teams to really be able to pay attention to what matters right now."
The key feature isn't the narrative itself — it's the triage list that follows. Insight tells teams which issues to fix immediately, which ones can wait a few hours, and which are longer-term items to schedule for a maintenance window. Each item comes with a time estimate attached.
That scoping matters. An ops engineer who knows a fix takes two minutes handles it now. One that needs a test environment and a two-hour window gets scheduled for the end of the month. F5 Insight is doing the planning work that used to require a meeting.
A Real Customer Example
F5 CEO Francois Locoh-Donou shared a concrete use case during the AppWorld keynote this morning. A major US healthcare company — one that supplies 75% of US hospitals and employs more than 50,000 people — had a small BIG-IP team that was completely overwhelmed. Application owners across the organization kept asking them to pull reports, interpret metrics, and diagnose issues. The team barely had time to fix anything because they were constantly translating data for people who needed answers.
When they rolled out the Application Study Tool — the precursor to F5 Insight — application owners could check on their own applications without filing a request. The BIG-IP team shifted from answering questions to actually fixing things.
That's the model F5 is scaling with Insight. Self-service observability so the people closest to the application can get answers, and the infrastructure experts can focus on work that actually requires their expertise.
What's Under the Hood
F5 Insight uses OpenTelemetry to collect telemetry across application and infrastructure layers. It connects to whatever LLM an organization has approved — it's not locked to a single model — and runs F5's own guardrails in front of it. Wormke was direct about this: there are no hallucinations because the AI assistant is trained specifically on F5 expertise and knowledge, not an open model pulling from general internet data.
The assistant is also interactive. Application owners can paste in questions they've received from other teams and get an answer. They can ask why a specific BIG-IP instance is underperforming. They can request a summary of current risk posture and get a plain-language response.
For teams already running BIG-IP, none of this requires standing up new infrastructure. Insight works with what's already deployed.
The Rollout Plan
F5 Insight is GA today for BIG-IP. The timeline for NGINX and Distributed Cloud is less rigid — Wormke described a customer-driven sequencing approach focused on where the most pain is across overlapping capabilities.
He pointed to automated certificate management as an early cross-platform priority. Customers running BIG-IP, NGINX, and Distributed Cloud in parallel have consistently said they don't want to manage certificates differently across each product. That's the kind of unified capability that will show up first.
By end of 2026 or into 2027, F5 expects Insight to be available in a unified management console across the full ADSP platform.
"Where are the customers feeling the most pain? That's the sequencing." — Shawn Wormke, SVP of Product Management, F5
Why This Matters for Developer and Engineering Teams
The immediate beneficiaries of F5 Insight aren't just ops teams. When infrastructure teams are stuck translating reports, developers wait longer for answers. When BIG-IP experts are buried in information requests, performance issues take longer to resolve.
Insight doesn't replace BIG-IP expertise — it reduces the number of people who need it on every request. That's a meaningful shift for engineering organizations where deep F5 knowledge is concentrated in a small number of people.
F5 is also positioning Insight as the observability foundation for everything else in the ADSP platform. As AI workloads add more traffic, more APIs, and more complexity to enterprise environments, the ability to surface what matters quickly — rather than requiring someone to dig through telemetry — becomes more valuable, not less.
