ADC

Rate limiting

The rate limiting feature enables you to define the maximum load for a given network entity or virtual entity on the Citrix ADC appliance. The feature enables you to configure the appliance to monitor the rate of traffic associated with the entity and take preventive action, in real time, based on the traffic rate. This feature is particularly useful when the network is under attack from a hostile client that is sending the appliance a flood of requests. You can mitigate the risks that affect the availability of resources to clients, and you can improve the reliability of the network and the resources that the appliance manages.

You can monitor and control the rate of traffic that is associated with virtual and user-defined entities, including virtual servers, URLs, domains, and combinations of URLs and domains. You can throttle the rate of traffic if it is too high, base information caching on the traffic rate, and redirect traffic to a given load balancing virtual server if the traffic rate exceeds a predefined limit. You can apply rate-based monitoring to HTTP, TCP, and DNS requests.

To monitor the rate of traffic for a given scenario, you configure a rate limit identifier. A rate limit identifier specifies numeric thresholds such as the maximum number of requests or connections (of a particular type) that are permitted in a specified time period called a time slice.

Optionally, you can configure filters, known as stream selectors, and associate them with rate limit identifiers when you configure the identifiers. After you configure the optional stream selector and the limit identifier, you must invoke the limit identifier from a default syntax policy. You can invoke identifiers from any feature in which the identifier may be useful, including rewrite, responder, DNS, and integrated caching.

You can globally enable and disable SNMP traps for rate limit identifiers. Each trap contains cumulative data for the rate limit identifier’s configured data collection interval (time slice), unless you specified multiple traps to be generated per time slice. For more information about configuring SNMP traps and managers, see SNMP.

Rate limiting