30 days of ADM: Day 2 September 30, 2022
Analytics with Citrix ADM
I am back, its day 2! The question is did you come back? Continuing the dog theme, here is a random doggie picture.
I’m hoping you did come back…
You have been selected for a training course in Citrix ADM, the goal is to provide you with enough information to be actually dangerous when talking to a customer or client. 30 days is a bit of an arbitrary number, but I am prepared to give you 2minutes of material, can I get 2minutes of your time? I talked about Fleet management on Day 1, today it will be all about analytics.
What are Analytics?
Analytics give you true insight into what the NetScaler is seeing on the wire or your infrastructure. Citrix has been doing this for a while, so these insights can be really helpful when you need to troubleshoot issues on the network or infrastructure. As an example, if the user is reporting slow performance, is it down to the network or a server? Or could it be where the user is trying to connect from today? Having more information about the conditions really helps make the right call when it comes to fixing things.
A revision of the detailed diagram to show where it can see what is going on.
The analytics in this case are a mixture of areas that ADM understands, I will write up a bit on each as they all offer value.
Infrastructure Analytics
I talked about fleet management in Day 1, one of the options in managing a fleet of appliances is to see what the various NetScaler’s are doing from a resource perspective. Of course, environmental loading issues can have a negative impact on a service. Ok, so what does ADM do here then?
There are a couple of views, each offer a drill down option to get more details. The table view is handy as you can see the useful metrics on memory and disk utilization with one view. The use of colour, again help draw your eye to the more severe issues.
The appliance Overview looks like this:
The top parameters are clear to see. If you can see the screen shot there are a bunch of useful things to get as part of this view.
· The Overview: has an overview.
· SSL offers an appliance specific SSL dashboard. This is specific to this appliance.
· Config audit, shows how the config has changed.
· Network functions is a report on load balancing.
· Network usage shows how busy the box is.
· Lastly, events is an appliance specific event view.
These are all handy to tell you what is going on. Obviously, who has time to sit looking at a console? There are ways to automate the events so that you see just what is pertinent.
HDX analytics
If Infrastructure analytics talks about the environment, HDX Analytics does a deep dive on the HDX sessions that are going via the appliance. Typically, this is when the appliance is deployed as a HDX Gateway and the user is somewhere external to the organization. That said, there is an option to gather analytics without using the gateway, but it’s a bit out of the scope of this piece.
Having a round trip time for the HDX/ICA protocol can be very handy, as it allows some identification of problem hosts or segments.
As well as an overview of the sessions, it can also break out how the round trip time is made up on an active session.
This looks pretty healthy!
Whereas this one has something going on with the network, 782ms seems a loooong time.
Web Analytics
Outside of HDX, the NetScaler can also process HTTP traffic, we can gather stats and analytics on that web traffic that we see.
Response times and how they get made up are broken down so again you can troubleshoot problems with performance. Getting a global view of where people are accessing a web server could allow you to take another look at your pops and better place you service to address those customers/users.
There is also Security Analytics, but that will require a section all on its own!
Summary.
Analytics is a powerful option that ADM offers, you want the user connections to work without issue and allow you to sell your stuff to the world. ADM can tell when your NetScaler is having issues and then offers some pointers on what you can do to fix the service
BTW, this capability is free for the first 2 Virtual servers! You can add packs of VIPS to cover off more than that.
What’s not to like?