30 Days of ADM: Day 20 October 21, 2022
Managing configuration in an Enterprise!
I am back, it is day 20.
I have talked about config jobs and stylebooks, both have their place. Let’s say you have yet to get to a state where ADM is the one source of truth. You just need to fight day to day to keep the services up. There is a team of guys and girls to help you out, they are all awesome! You plan to bring in ADM, as some bloke has been banging on about it for about three weeks and won’t shut up. Really, all you want is something that could track changes on the appliances.
We can do that!
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 you2 minutes 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, Web Transaction Analytics, Config Jobs, Network Reporting, SSL Dashboard, RBAC and event handling.
Today is all about config drift
Honestly, what are you talking about?
Managing a number of devices requires some consistency, this is especially true when there is a team working on the problem. ADM can offer some tools to track and give you insight into those change(s).
So what? What problem does it solve?
Sarah has been making some changes, there is a new time standard on the network and she has updated the devices to use it. All good.
Or is it?
The network appliances have a life span, over time their config can evolve as changes get made. This evolution is sometimes called drift. What helps with this is the ability to template setups so that you deploy a consistent configuration, no matter which site you work at.
Also, you may find that changes have been made to the running config but not saved, which were they and what will the impact be if they get taken out by a power spike?
It is another superpower!
Who would be interested in this?
Almost any customer uses a few different NetScaler appliances within their infrastructure. That’s everyone, right?
How can you use it?
ADM gives you the option to create some templates for your base configs, you can then use these against your deployed appliances to see what is going on. It all starts with the Configuration Audit dashboard.
You gotta love the dashboard!
This drill-down view gives you where you are now and where you might have issues, it also tracks changes. That Azure appliance looks to have a bunch of changes. Who has done those? Click on the long blue bar and it gives you the details.
What has admin been up to?
Show me more.
Ok, so I have a HA pair. ADM has picked up that there are a bunch of changes that havebeen added since the last save config. If the appliances loose power, theconfig will revert to saved.
What stops working?
ADM gives you this report that lets you.
1. Pull out the changes in a diff report
2. Export the corrective commands to fix this.
You can then have a better look at what changes you need to apply.
Summary
Having ADM give you this information is something that it has done forever!
It’s funny, that this lowly capability is not given more press!
Insight into what changes have been made by who is also very useful, as it allows you to understand if there was an unneeded change made which affected service.
All of this will help you stay on top of your environment. 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?