f5audit

Read-only audit tool for F5 BIG-IP LTM. It collects configuration and statistics via iControl REST (GET only), correlates object references, and produces a multi-sheet Excel report identifying unused objects (nodes, pools, virtual servers, monitors) as input for a human-driven, change- controlled cleanup.

This tool never modifies the device. The "suggested command" columns in the report are informational text only; nothing is ever executed. They are written bare (delete ltm node ..., no tmsh prefix), for pasting into a tmsh shell during the change window.

Safety design

• The HTTP client (F5ReadOnlyClient) exposes a single get() method. There are no post/patch/put/delete methods. The only internal write is the token login, hardcoded to /mgmt/shared/authn/login. This is enforced by structural tests.
• No tmsh/bash execution endpoints are used or referenced anywhere.
• No explicit logout (deleting the token would be a write); tokens expire on their own (~20 minutes).
• Passwords are read from an interactive prompt (getpass) or the F5_PASS environment variable — never from a CLI argument, and never written to disk or logs.
• Management-plane friendly: sequential requests only, $top/$skip pagination, per-request delay (--delay, default 0.1 s), 30 s timeout, max 2 retries with exponential backoff.
• The optional ping post-process is the sole SSH feature: opt-in, separate from collection, and structurally ping-only — fixed command templates, the only interpolated value is an ipaddress-validated IPv4 literal, and non-ping commands are refused at runtime. Ping is read-only ICMP; nothing on the device is created, modified, or deleted. SSH host keys are auto-accepted (management-network tool, same spirit as --insecure).

Requirements

• Python >= 3.9, requests, openpyxl
• An account with a read-only role (Auditor/Guest) and iControl REST access on the BIG-IP
• Network access to the management interface (TCP 443)
• Only for the optional ping post-process: pip install 'f5audit[ssh]' (paramiko) and SSH access (TCP 22) with an account that can run ping

Installation

pip install f5audit

From source: pip install . — or without installing, from the project directory: python -m f5audit ...

Usage

1. Validate access first

f5audit validate --host 192.0.2.1 --user auditor --insecure

Probes login plus the key GET endpoints and prints a diagnosis per response code (bad credentials, missing REST access, denied endpoints, old BIG-IP versions, network timeouts).

2. Collect once, analyze offline N times

f5audit collect --host 192.0.2.1 --user auditor --insecure --save-raw ./raw/
f5audit analyze --from-raw ./raw/ --out report.xlsx

collect saves every raw JSON response (with timestamps) to disk; analyze --from-raw re-analyzes from that cache without touching the F5 again. This is the recommended workflow: one collection per session, all further analysis offline.

Resumable collection: pointing --save-raw at a directory that already contains raw JSON fetches only the missing datasets — use it to resume an aborted collection, or to top up an old cache with data a newer version collects (e.g. the ARP/self-IP tables). Whatever failed previously has no file and is retried once; whatever succeeded is never re-fetched. Note the resulting cache mixes collection times (flagged on the Summary sheet); for a fully time-consistent snapshot, use a fresh directory.

Virtual server profiles (/mgmt/tm/ltm/virtual/<vs>/profiles, one GET per virtual server, never expandSubcollections) feed the virtual server rollback commands. A cache collected before they existed has no profile files: its reports leave the virtual server rollback blank and say so. Resume collect --save-raw on that directory to backfill only them.

One-step alternative

f5audit analyze --host 192.0.2.1 --user auditor --insecure --save-raw ./raw/ --out report.xlsx

3. Optional post-process: ping the removal candidates over SSH

pip install 'f5audit[ssh]'
f5audit ping --report report.xlsx --host 192.0.2.1 --user auditor

Double-checks the removal candidates in an already generated report: a node with no ARP entry that also does not answer ping is a much safer deletion conversation. The command reads the IP column of the Orphan Nodes sheet — by construction the nodes that are not IN USE, so in-use nodes are never pinged — deduplicates the IPs (a node in several pools is pinged once), runs ping on the BIG-IP over SSH for each unique IPv4, and writes two columns into both the Inventory and Orphan Nodes sheets in place, replicating each IP's result across every row where it appears (on Inventory it fills the Ping (from F5) / Ping note columns the report already reserves, so the other columns never move):

Notes:

• Works with both Advanced-shell (bash) and tmsh-shell accounts — the command form is auto-detected with one probe.
• Password from F5_PASS or an interactive prompt, as everywhere else; SSH keys/agent are also tried automatically.
• Close the report in Excel first: if the file is locked, results are saved to <name>_ping.xlsx instead of being lost.
• Re-running overwrites the ping columns (never duplicates them).
• Like ARP, ping is point-in-time evidence: NO means "did not answer at that moment", not "gone". --count (default 2) echo requests are sent per IP, sequentially.

Options

Exit codes: 0 OK · 1 connection/auth error · 2 analysis completed with warnings (standby device, denied partitions, missing endpoints).

Verdicts

Operational warning

• Collect on the ACTIVE unit of the HA pair. On a standby unit traffic counters are zeros and the tool will skip traffic analysis (or mark it UNRELIABLE with --allow-standby).
• Traffic counters reset on reboot / stats reset. Ideally collect after several weeks of uptime; the report includes the failover-state age as context.
• INACTIVE means "no traffic since the counters started", not "safe to delete". Use the planned compare workflow (v2) — two collections some weeks apart — to distinguish real zero traffic from a recent reset. The raw cache already stores per-file timestamps to enable this.
• Availability is point-in-time: an OFFLINE chain reflects monitor state at collection time and may mean maintenance rather than decommissioning (an empty pool is the exception: that is configuration). Always confirm with the config owner before requesting deletion.
• The ARP table is also point-in-time and per-unit: "no ARP entry" on a local subnet means the host was idle (or down) at collection time — dynamic entries expire after minutes of silence — and on a standby unit the table reflects that unit, not the pair. The network columns are informational context, never a verdict input.

Report sheets

1. Summary — hostname, version, HA state, uptime context, partitions, verdict counts, active warnings.
2. Inventory — one row per pool member (plus rows for pool-less nodes), fully correlated: node ↔ pool ↔ virtual server ↔ monitor ↔ iRule/policy references, statuses and traffic, plus the network context columns described below. Each row carries both the Node verdict and the (colored) Pool verdict with its notes, since a node can be OFFLINE inside a pool held at MANUAL REVIEW. Two columns concern iRules and are not expected to match: VS iRules is configuration (the iRules attached to the row's virtual servers — in F5, iRules only attach to virtual servers), while iRules selecting pool is code analysis (every iRule whose Tcl contains pool <this pool>, whichever virtual server it is attached to). The latter, with Policies forwarding to pool, is the evidence that keeps a pool with no default-pool reference from being ORPHAN. Columns V:W are reserved for f5audit ping, and X:AA hold the change-request commands described below.
3. Orphan Nodes · 4. Orphan-Inactive Pools (with the same iRules selecting pool / Policies forwarding to pool evidence columns) · 5. Inactive Virtual Servers (with the attached iRules) — filtered views with the change and rollback commands described below.
4. Dead Chains — one row per dead pool (empty or monitor-offline; verdict OFFLINE (decommission candidate), or MANUAL REVIEW when dynamic iRules cap it, a member node is still IN USE, or its virtual server carries iRules/policies), grouping the whole chain (virtual servers → pool → member nodes) with per-object verdicts and the change and rollback commands described below.
5. Orphan Monitors — filtered view with informational tmsh commands.
6. Manual Review — objects held back from a removal verdict, with what causes the doubt: the dynamic iRule/policy, the owning iApp, the IN USE member node(s) of a dead pool, or the iRules/policies attached to a dead virtual server.

Color coding: red = ORPHAN · yellow = MANUAL REVIEW / UNRELIABLE · orange = INACTIVE · purple = OFFLINE · green = IN USE.

Change-request columns (Inventory)

Based on the row's node verdict, the Inventory sheet fills four columns with informational tmsh text (bare, for a tmsh shell) to paste into the change request. Nothing is generated as a script and nothing is executed.

Every other verdict, MANUAL REVIEW and UNRELIABLE included, leaves the four cells blank. Details:

• An OFFLINE node in several pools gets one row per pool. Run every members delete line for that node first: delete ltm node fails while the node is still a pool member.
• The rollback restores what lives on the deleted objects: the node's own monitor (... monitor <monitor>) when it is not default, and the member's non-default settings ({ priority-group N ratio N connection-limit N session user-disabled }). Pool monitors live on the pool and need no rollback.
• A node named by its IPv6 literal uses . before the port (/Common/2001:db8::10.443); FQDN nodes are recreated with fqdn { name <host> } instead of address.

Change and rollback columns (filtered sheets)

Each filtered sheet carries one column per step, with the informational tmsh text relevant to that sheet. Only ORPHAN and OFFLINE rows get commands; every other verdict leaves them blank. Cells with several commands hold one per line. Syntax and order follow the official tmsh reference: change order is virtual servers → pool → nodes, rollback is the reverse.

• Pools referenced by an iRule or an LTM policy get no commands: tmsh refuses delete ltm pool while an iRule names it literally or a policy forwards to it, and editing Tcl or a policy draft is not something to generate. The Notes column names the references to edit first.
• Dead Chains only emits what tmsh would accept in that order: the pool is deleted only when no virtual server that stays still uses it as default pool, and a node only when this pool is deleted here and was its last pool. Otherwise the Notes column points to the sheet with the right commands.
• Pool rollback restores members (with non-default priority-group, ratio, connection-limit, disabled session), the monitor expression as configured (min 1 of { ... } included), load-balancing-mode, min-active-members, slow-ramp-time, service-down-action and description. members add auto-creates missing nodes with default settings, so recreate the nodes first.
• Virtual server rollback restores destination, mask, protocol, default pool, profiles with their context, iRules (in execution order), policies, persistence, fallback persistence, source address translation, VLANs, address/port translation, source, connection limit, description and disabled state. Deleting the last virtual server on an address also deletes its virtual-address (auto-delete); it comes back with default settings, so the notes ask to record any non-default virtual-address setting first.

Network context columns (Inventory, Orphan Nodes)

Every collection also reads the F5's own network tables — self-IPs (net/self), the static ARP entries (net/arp) and the dynamic ARP table (net/arp/stats), all plain GETs — and appends two informational columns per node:

• ARP MAC — the node's MAC address when it appears in the ARP table.
• Network note — one of: in ARP table (MAC ...) (the host answered ARP recently, so it existed at collection time); on local subnet, no ARP entry (idle or down) (directly connected per the self-IP subnets, but silent); not directly connected (behind a router) (the F5 would never have an ARP entry for it); or a degradation note (FQDN node, IPv6 address, self-IP data unavailable, network data not collected for caches from older versions).

An orphan node that is also absent from ARP makes a safer deletion conversation — but these columns never change a verdict.

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
ruff check f5audit tests && ruff format --check f5audit tests
pytest

No test touches the network; everything runs from anonymized JSON fixtures and mocked HTTP sessions. Structural tests assert the client exposes no write verbs and that no forbidden endpoint appears in the source. CI runs lint plus the test suite on Python 3.9 through 3.14; all checks must pass before a PR can merge.

Releases are published to PyPI automatically: bump __version__ in f5audit/__init__.py, merge, and create a GitHub release tagged v<version>. The release workflow verifies the tag matches the package version, builds, and publishes via PyPI Trusted Publishing (no stored API tokens).