30 days of ADM: Day 15 October 21, 2022
Config jobs, automate the boring stuff.
I am back, it is day 15. We are halfway!
What was it that Groucho Marx said?
“A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”
It is your second day on the Citrix admin job, you get a 5-minutehandover from your colleague Ronan. Your task is to roll out a configuration update to a global fleet of NetScaler’s.
GULP!!!!!! No pressure.
How can you capture a little bit of Ronan’s genius and avoid a catastrophic configuration error?
Help!
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 2 minutes of your time?
I have talked about Fleet management, general analytics, security analytics, AI / ML, Stylebooks, Pooled Capacity, instance advisory upgrade, security advisory, Autoscaling, onboarding, RESTful API, CADS self-managed, Service Graph and Web Transaction Analytics
Today is all about Config Jobs
Honestly, what are you talking about?
When you need to make an update to the appliance configuration, you could go to each appliance and do it by hand. It would take a while but could work. The issue isthat you are time limited. Also, could you ensure that you are repeatable with every change?
What you need is a consistent way to bang out the change, so you can head off and catch Aranda Grande in concert. An ADM configuration job gives you a framework to deliver changes, this can be to one appliance or many.
So what? What problem does it solve?
On one of the earlier days, day 5, I talked about something called Stylebooks. Stylebooksare great for an appliance setup specific to an application. They do not really fit for changes to more general appliance settings, like say DNS or time standards.
Configuration Jobs gives you another, more generic option to make changes.
Who would be interested in this?
Almost any customer uses one or more NetScaler within their infrastructure. That’s everyone, right?
Let me have an example of its use.
My favorite feature in this module is Record and Play.
In the example above we have our expert, Ronan. Configuration jobs has the record and play feature this would allow us to capture some of Ronan’s expertise and saveit as a job.
What are the steps?
1. Ask Ronan to spare you 5minutes.
2. Set up ADM to record his commands(like magic!).
3. Have Ronan do the commands(more magic).
4. Save and deploy it to the world!
What else?
In the screenshot above there are a few other things. Such as templates, files, or instances, so you can get settings for different sources. You can also check the status of the jobs you have already deployed and verify if they went okay from the configlog.
Show me it in action.
Of course, Sanyukta has already covered this and posted it on YouTube! Naturally, it’s 41 minutes of material.
I thought one of the comments was a bit harsh, the internet can be a tough crowd, so demanding!
Summary.
Having a Configjob is a great option. You get the ability to manage your infrastructure serving your clients from one console. With tools like this, you can save time and ensure that you get back to high-value tasks.
Ultimately, it is another killer feature that is enabled with ADM service.
It is free too.
What’s not to like?