NetScaler Console service

Features and solutions

This document describes the features that are supported on the NetScaler Console.

Application analytics and management

Application Analytics and Management feature of NetScaler Console strengthens the application-centric approach to help you address various application delivery challenges. This approach gives you visibility into the health scores of applications, helps you determine the security risks, and helps you detect anomalies in the application traffic flows and take corrective actions.

  • Application performance analytics: App Score is the product of a scoring system that defines how well an application is performing. It shows whether the application is performing well in terms of responsiveness, is not vulnerable to threats, and has all systems up and running.

  • Application security analytics: The App Security Dashboard provides a holistic view of the security status of your applications. For example, it shows key security metrics such as security violations, signature violations, threat indexes. App Security dashboard also displays attack related information such as SYN attacks, small window attacks, and DNS flood attacks for the discovered NetScaler instances.

  • Intelligent App Analytics: The Intelligent App Analytics feature provides an easy and scalable solution for monitoring and troubleshooting applications that are delivered through NetScaler appliances. Intelligent App Analytics not only monitors all the levels of application transactions, but also uses machine learning techniques to define normal traffic patterns in your network and detect anomalies. This feature reduces the overall turnaround time and improves the overall application uptime.

StyleBooks

StyleBooks simplify the task of managing complex NetScaler configurations for your applications. A StyleBook is a template that you can use to create and manage NetScaler configurations. You can create a StyleBook for configuring a specific feature of NetScaler, or you can design a StyleBook to create configurations for an enterprise application deployment such as Microsoft Exchange or Skype for Business.

Instance management

Enables you to manage the NetScaler, NetScaler Gateway, and Citrix Secure Web Gateway instances.

Event management

Events represent occurrences of events or errors on a managed NetScaler instance. For example, when there is a system failure or change in configuration, an event is generated and recorded on NetScaler Console. Following are the related features that you can configure or view by using NetScaler Console:

Certificate management

NetScaler Console streamlines every aspect of certificate management for you. Through a single console, you can establish automated policies to ensure the right issuer, key strength, and correct algorithms, while keeping close tabs on certificates that are unused or soon to expire.

Configuration management

NetScaler Console allows you to create configuration jobs that help you perform configuration tasks, such as creating entities, configuring features, replication of configuration changes, system upgrades, and other maintenance activities with ease on multiple instances. Configuration jobs and templates simplify the most repetitive administrative tasks to a single task on NetScaler Console.

Configuration audit

Enables you to monitor and identify anomalies in the configurations across your instances.

License management

Allows you to manage NetScaler licenses by configuring NetScaler Console as license manager.

  • NetScaler pooled capacity: A common license pool from which your NetScaler instance can check out one instance license and only as much bandwidth as it needs. When the instance no longer requires these resources, it checks them back in to the common pool, making the resources available to other instances that need them.

  • NetScaler VPX check-in and check-out licensing: NetScaler Console allocates licenses NetScaler VPX instances on demand. A NetScaler VPX instance can check out the license from the NetScaler Console when a NetScaler VPX instance is provisioned, or check back in its license to NetScaler Console when an instance is removed or destroyed.

Network reporting

You can optimize resource usage by monitoring your network reporting on NetScaler Console.

Analytics

Provides an easy and scalable way to look into the various insights of the NetScaler instances’ data to describe, predict, and improve application performance. You can use one or more analytics features simultaneously.

  • HDX Insight: Provides end-to end visibility for ICA traffic passing through NetScaler. HDX Insight enables administrators to view real-time client and network latency metrics, historical reports, end-to-end performance data, and troubleshoot performance issues.

  • Web Insight: Provides visibility into enterprise web applications. It allows IT administrators to monitor all web applications served by the NetScaler by providing integrated and real-time monitoring of applications. Web Insight processes data from NetScaler using an approximation algorithm. It provides top 1,000 records of the metrics related to the web applications in your enterprise.

  • Gateway Insight: Provides visibility into the failures that users encounter when logging on, regardless of the access mode. You can view a list of users logged on at a given time, along with the number of active users, number of active sessions, and bytes and licenses used by all users at any given time.

  • Security Insight: Provides a single-pane solution to help you assess your application security status and take corrective actions to secure your applications.

  • SSL Insight: Provides visibility into secure transactions on the web (HTTPs). It allows IT administrators to monitor all web applications served by the NetScaler by providing integrated, real-time, and historic monitoring of web transactions. SSL insight processes data from NetScaler using an approximation algorithm. It provides top 1,000 records of the metrics related to the web transactions in your enterprise.

Role-based access control

Role-based access control (RBAC) allows you to grant access permissions based on the roles of individual users within your enterprise. The first user of an organization who logs on with Citrix Cloud credentials has the super admin role who, by default, has all access permissions. The other users of that organization, who are later created by the admin, are granted non-admin roles.

Subscriptions

Provides a dashboard view of the subscriptions that you have purchased.

You are assigned to an Express account by default. With this account, you can manage limited NetScaler Console resources. For more information, see Manage NetScaler Console resources using Express account.

The following NetScaler Console features are currently not available:

  • Deployment

    • Migrating from Citrix Insight Center to NetScaler Console

    • Integrating NetScaler Console with Citrix Virtual Desktop Director

  • Analytics: TCP Insight and Video Insight

  • Limited System Settings

  • Orchestration

    • Integration with OpenStack and VMware NSX Manager

    • NetScaler Automation in Cisco ACI’s Hybrid Mode

    • Container Orchestration: Integration with Mesos/Marathon and Kubernetes

Features and solutions

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