US Patent 10511514 Node-specific probes in a native load balancer

A network apparatus for providing native load balancing, having: a first network interface to communicatively couple to a first network; a plurality of second network interfaces to communicatively couple to a second network; one or more logic elements providing a switching engine to provide network switching or routing; and one or more logic elements, including at least one hardware logic element, providing a load balancing engine to: load balance network traffic among a plurality of service nodes; probe a first service node with a first probe; and probe a second service node with a second probe, the second probe different in kind from the first probe.