What is Zeus Traffic Manager?

Zeus Traffic Manager (previously known as ZXTM) is a very sophisticated load balancer for networked services like web servers, email and applications running on J2EE, .Net, PHP or Ruby.

Sophisticated load balancers like Zeus Traffic Manager are often referred to as Application Delivery Controllers.

What it does...

Zeus Traffic Manager does a lot more than just load balancing TCP and UDP traffic. Zeus Traffic Manager can:

• inspect and rewrite the entire application stream
• decrypt and re-encrypt all SSL and TLS-encrypted traffic
• bandwidth-shape and rate-shape traffic
• cache HTTP responses
• offload compression and XML operations, as well as SSL decryption
• monitor the performance and availability of back-end servers and adjust load-balancing automatically
• apply security policies to ensure that requests are valid and permissible

The magic of TrafficScript

The true power of Zeus Traffic Manager becomes apparent when you consider TrafficScript, the scripting language built into the core of Zeus Traffic Manager. With TrafficScript rules, you can specify precisely how you want your network traffic to be handled:

Identify less valuable traffic like web spiders and limit the requests-per-second they submit; Work around broken links and content on your website; Control precisely what content is cached, and for how long; Turn traffic management policies on and off at different times of day - launching a website at 5am for example; Rewrite outgoing content to insert javascript, mask sensitive data, add META tags to documents and fix copyright dates; Process data from different datasources, embedding RSS feeds or Google search results for example; Protect against DoS attacks; Bandwidth-limit certain types of responses.

Find out more: Take a look at the TrafficScript Fact Sheet for some more examples, and browse the articles and code samples on this site.

Visualization and Diagnostics

As well as managing your traffic in a multitude of ways, Zeus Traffic Manager gives you some very useful visualization and diagnosis tools to help you understand and debug your application traffic.

• The Activity Monitor graphs hundreds of different statistics, from bytes transferred to response times from individual nodes. All of these statistics are also exported using SNMP;
• The Diagnosis page runs lots of connectivity and application tests across your clusters of traffic managers and applications, and reports on any problems that might be affecting your service;
• The 'recent connections' and 'cached files' reports help you to understand what has just happened - invaluable when tracking down problems;
• Configurable webserver-style access logging can record every transaction that your traffic manager processes.

Much of this data can also be retrieved using SNMP or Zeus Traffic Manager's SOAP-based Control API.

What does it look like?

Zeus Traffic Manager is unique. All other application-layer traffic managers are proprietary hardware devices. Zeus Traffic Manager is the only application-aware traffic manager available as software, as well as virtual appliances.

The software in the Zeus Traffic Manager product is considerably more sophisticated than the traffic management software in competing devices, and the Zeus Traffic Manager solution is considerably less expensive.

To try the software out, a good place to begin is the Zeus Desktop Edition, a free version of the software that contains a number of scenarios and worked examples to illustrate the power of the Zeus software.

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 07 February 2007