F5 Unveils New AI-Powered Controls and Observability for Big-IP and NGINX

The updates aim to simplify operations and accelerate secure AI adoption across modern application environments.

Mar. 11, 2026 at 11:17pm

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F5 has announced a broad set of updates to its Application Delivery and Security Platform, including a new observability product called F5 Insight, AI-powered WAF risk scoring, a new AI security remediation tool, post-quantum cryptography support in BIG-IP v21.1, AI agent traffic visibility in NGINX, and an accelerated NGINX Gateway Fabric for Kubernetes deployments.

Why it matters

These updates from F5 are designed to help customers better secure, manage, and gain visibility into modern application traffic, including the growing use of AI agents. As AI adoption accelerates, enterprises need tools to ensure these automated systems can be deployed at scale in a secure and reliable manner.

The details

The key updates include F5 Insight, a new observability and analytics product that provides end-to-end visibility for Big-IP deployments; AI-powered WAF risk scoring to reduce alert fatigue; AI Remediate to automate the creation of custom security guardrails; NGINX enhancements to classify and manage AI agent traffic; and a new NGINX Gateway Fabric to replace the end-of-life Ingress-NGINX controller in Kubernetes environments.

  • The updates were announced at F5's AppWorld conference in Las Vegas this week.
  • Big-IP v21.1, which includes the post-quantum cryptography and control plane scalability improvements, is generally available now.

The players

F5

An American company that provides application delivery networking and security products and services.

Shawn Wormke

Senior vice president and general manager at F5.

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What they’re saying

“Our application delivery and security platform is really meant to help simplify operations and accelerate secure AI adoption, and ultimately help our customers have highly available and secure applications for their end users and their end customers.”

— Shawn Wormke, Senior vice president and general manager (Network World)

What’s next

F5 plans to expand the SaaS delivery model for F5 Insight and extend its coverage to NGINX and Distributed Cloud Services in future releases.

The takeaway

These updates from F5 demonstrate the growing importance of providing comprehensive observability, security, and management capabilities to support the increasing use of AI and automation in modern application environments.