Saturday July 16, 2022
The key things that you need to know about Citrix ADM
What does Citrix ADM offer? Here are the 6 key things you need to know about ADM
I was talking to a colleague yesterday and he asked for a session on what Citrix ADM offers. I was thinking, what are the 6 key things that Citrix Application Delivery Management offers?
1. What is it?
Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM for short!) is a management, reporting and automation platform that works with our Citrix ADC. Its a one stop shop for seeing what is going on with your ADC estate and remediating issues or updates.
I guess the key question is so what? Why should you care?
I'll answer that with this. When you deploy a Citrix ADC to do anything (load balance, add web security or as a Gateway for Citrix DaaS) how do you know what is really going on? Maybe you just wait for the phone to ring with users complaining about the poor service?
A better option is to have ADM report on system status and help see how your environment is performing. Getting ahead of the status issue is always a good place to be!
2. Cost and deployment.
Citrix is big on choice, we know that some customers are not ready to go to the cloud and use a SaaS offering. To enable that, we allow two deployment options, so you can set it up in your own DC as a virtual appliance or take a SaaS offering from us. There are some differences between the two deployment types in terms of features and in the longer term that will widen as more gets added to the SaaS offering. However, for now they are pretty similar.
What about cost?
On-premise is free to deploy and setup, naturally you will need some resources to run it (actually, quite a bit of resources! 32GB and 8 cores...), assuming you need to gather analytics you will need to purchase Virtual IP packs to add to this. Running the SaaS service is similar, you would need to add VIP packs to gather analytics plus pay for data retention.
3. Manage your ADC estate from one place.
When you have a number of Citrix ADC's in different data centres, having a repeatability of config really helps maintain your security posture. One of the challenges is to get a decent view of the status of all your devices. Citrix calls this 'Hybrid Multi Cloud' or HMC dashboard view...its really common to have appliances in lots of different places.
This view allows you to drill into your environment and take a closer look at different bits of it, irrespective of where the appliances are. ADM also has configuration options to push out and maintain your ADC estate from one place, you can even perform cloud migrations using ADM.
4. A SSL Dashboard
A what? In this case we can get a single view of all the SSL certificates that you have in use across your estate, it allows you to see what ciphers they use and also what certificates are going to expire. A key thing to know when you run online services.
5. A security dashboard.
The ADC can provide a range of security benefits, a by product of that is we can get visibility of security events and take control! Maybe you have someone from a specific country trying to test your defenses, you will see this with the mapping function.
My colleagues Ronan and Prince will do a deeper dive into the security options of ADC paired with ADM next week, look in the comments for links to register.
6. Instance advisory
Picture the scene, you deploy a number of ADC's, your users are happy, everything is good!
NEWS FLASH!! Citrix have a critical CVE in their ADC!!!!!
What do you do? The first question you need to check is which appliances do we have deployed that are at risk? ADM can help with this is two ways, it clarifies which systems are in need of updating and it also provides a way to perform the upgrade.
Summary
For me, these are the six top capabilities in ADM. Typically, there is so much capability in the product it can be tricky to know what to share.
What is the call to action? Have a look in the comments for the links to future web sessions. If there are questions let me know and I will try to clarify with a follow up posting.
stay safe!