What is ZXTM?

ZXTM (Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager) 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 ZXTM are often referred to as Application Traffic Managers.

What it does...

ZXTM does a lot more than just load balancing TCP and UDP traffic. ZXTM 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

Find out more: The How it works animation shows how ZXTM processes incoming and outgoing traffic.

The magic of TrafficScript™

The true power of ZXTM becomes apparent when you consider TrafficScript™, the scripting language built into the core of ZXTM. 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, ZXTM 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 ZXTMs 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 ZXTM's SOAP-based Control API.

What does it look like?

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

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

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

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 07 February 2007