Get Started with Bot Defense Advanced
Bot Defense Advanced protects your web and mobile application endpoints from automated attacks by identifying and mitigating malicious or bad bots. For more information about Bot Defense Advanced features, see Bot Defense Overview.
Important: Bot Defense Advanced Self-Service Policy Management is an Early Access feature.
The following information helps you get started with Bot Defense Advanced.
Step 1: Sign Up for Bot Defense Advanced
To enable Bot Defense Advanced, contact your F5 Technical Account Manager (TAM). Once enabled, your TAM and the F5 Services team help you quickly get your Bot Defense Advanced infrastructure and policies configured to protect your applications from automated attacks, such as credential stuffing, denial of service, web scraping and so on.
As your applications change and you add new endpoints to your environment, you can use Bot Defense Advanced Self-Service Policy Management to make changes to your policies, or you can contact your TAM for assistance. To make changes to your Bot infrastructure, contact your TAM.
Bot Defense Advanced Self-Service Policy Management is available from the Distributed Cloud Console. You must have one or more of the following permissions:
- f5xc-bot-defense-admin role: Provides advanced administrative access, including service activation.
- f5xc-bot-defense-user role: Provides read and write access to bot policies and read access to bot infrastructure. This role also grants permission to deploy new bot policy versions.
- f5xc-bot-defense-monitor role: Provides read-only access to bot infrastructure, bot policies and dashboards.
- f5xc-bot-defense-report role: Provides permissions to create and manage monthly Bot Defense reports.
If you do not have any of these roles, contact your Bot Defense administrator or your TAM.
Step 2: Decide What You Want to Protect
You must decide which endpoints you want to protect with Bot Defense. For information about what to consider when you configure web and mobile endpoints, see the following information:
Step 3: Configure Your Bot Policies
Bot Defense Advanced provides three system policies that allow you to control system configuration settings:
The F5 Operations team performs a site analysis and creates the initial version of each policy and then works with you to deploy the policies in your Bot Infrastructure.
Bot Defense Advanced Self-Service Policy Management allows you to make and deploy any necessary changes to your policies, for example, to protect new endpoints, update mitigation actions, add new clients to the allowlist or to add new network routes. If you prefer, you can also work with your F5 Operations Team to make these changes.
Use the Distributed Cloud Console to view and manage your policies, including details of current and past policy versions.
Step 4: Test Your Configuration
Use the Test cluster provided to you by F5 to test your Bot Defense deployment and help ensure that Bot Defense policies are properly configured, that JavaScript tags are injected in your application pages correctly, or that you have correctly integrated the mobile SDK.
For information, see Test Your Bot Defense Advanced Configuration.
Step 5: Deploy Policies in Your Production Environment
After you verify in your test environment that Bot Defense is configured correctly and correctly identifying automated traffic, work with your F5 Operations team to deploy your policies in a production environment.