30 Days of ADM: Day 1 September 30, 2022
Fleet management with Citrix ADM
Why? What have I been smoking? Where can I get some? What is the picture of the service dog?
Hold on…. Its not like that. Honest. The dog analogy, service dogs help you see....or hear.
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?
Today is all about Fleet Management
What is ADM? Woof woof!
Citrix has a management platform that works in conjunction with its NetScaler ADC, it offers many insights into what the NetScaler sees. This is a good thing as knowledge is power after all.
Architecturally it looks like this.
Looking at the detailed diagram above, I have one NetScaler, so the term ‘Fleet Management’ does look like a bit of a stretch. That is true, however the idea is that once you have the tool to manage one appliance it will scale up to manage many. The users have their connections handled by the NetScaler, it then ensures that they are directed on to the best webserver for their session.
In simple terms, its good to know what the status of your infrastructure is before your phone starts ringing. Grrrr.
What does it look like when there is more than one NetScaler to look at?
You can have a table or the view above. There is then an option to drill into anything that jumps out and see more details on why it got flagged. For example, here is one:
There are some colour codes for the types of warnings, so it is easy to spot the big ticket items.
Summary.
Fleet management is a really handy superpower, you want the user connections to work without issue and allow you to sell widgets by the boatload. ADM can tell when you the NetScaler is having issues and then offers some pointers on what you can do to fix it.
BTW, this capability is free.
What’s not to like?
