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Low-touch onboarding of Citrix ADC instances using Citrix ADM service connect

March 16, 2021
Contributed by: 
S

As your hybrid multi-cloud (HMC) infrastructure grows, the challenges to manage, monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot ADC instances become multifold. A centralized controller providing visibility into your complete infrastructure and all the applications running on it becomes the need of the hour.

In today’s world, onboarding your instances to a central controller needs to be done in a fast, easy, and low-touch manner. Keeping this need in mind, Citrix ADM service launches a new onboarding workflow, which provides you a faster way to get complete visibility into your HMC deployment.

Overview: components of ADM service onboarding workflow

The building blocks of this workflow are two ADC-side components: ADC service connect and Call Home.

  • ADM service connect: it is a new feature in ADC that helps enable seamless onboarding of Citrix ADC instances onto Citrix ADM service. This feature lets the Citrix ADC instance automatically connect with Citrix ADM service and send system, usage, and telemetry data to ADM service. Based on this data, the Citrix ADM service gives you insights and recommendations on your Citrix ADC infrastructure. Such as quick identification of performance issues, high resource usage, and critical errors.

    ADM service connect is available on the following ADC versions:

  • Call Home: it is an existing feature in ADC, which periodically monitors the instances and automatically uploads data to the Citrix technical support server. For more details, see Call Home. The data collected by Call Home is also routed to ADM service to enable this new workflow.

All ADC instances with internet connectivity or Call Home, or instances enabled with ADM service connect are connected to ADM service. ADM service starts collecting relevant metrics from these ADC instances through Call Home route, ADM service connect route, or both. For more information, see Data governance for MPX and VPX instances and Data governance for SDX instances.

Using this data, ADM service creates an inventory of ADC instances for every customer (unique org ID), which shows you a consolidated list of your ADC instances. ADM service also uses this data to create insights on your ADC and Gateway instances, which give meaningful insights into your HMC deployments, identifies issues, and recommends actions to mitigate the issues. Before you can mitigate the issues, you must onboard the ADC instances to ADM service. You can check Select ADC and Gateway instances to onboard and select the ADC instances you want to onboard to ADM service. After you start, you are guided to the onboarding process.

The auto-onboarding process uses ADM service connect, which makes the experience automated, seamless, and faster. For ADC instances on versions that do not support ADM service connect and auto-onboarding, ADM service provides use script-based onboarding, which is a semi-automated process.

Note

The auto and script-based onboarding use a built-in agent. However, this workflow also gives you the flexibility to use an external agent for onboarding. You can use the external agent-based onboarding if you want to use pooled licensing or the complete analytics suite in ADM service. Or if you want both use pooled licensing and the complete analytics suite. The built-in agent supports only management and monitoring.

A quick tour of onboarding

Your first touchpoint in the onboarding journey is a product-initiated email. Here’s a quick tour of the onboarding journey:

  1. A Citrix product-initiated email: You receive an email from ADM service showing some key insights of your ADC infrastructure and inviting you to get started with ADM service. Click the link given in email.
  2. Citrix Cloud login page: You must sign in to Citrix Cloud using your My Citrix credentials.

  3. Citrix ADM Service welcome page: You get an overview of ADM service and its benefits.

  4. Insights on your ADC and Gateway instances: You get detailed insights into your overall ADC infrastructure including security advisory (advice on current Citrix CVEs), upgrade advisory (advice based on EOM/EOL timelines) , key metrics, trends, and highlights the issues affecting ADC performance and health and recommends way to mitigate the issues.

  5. Select ADC and Gateway instances to onboard: You get a consolidated view of your ADC inventory. You can select which ADC instances you want to onboard to ADM service.

  6. Onboard ADC instances to ADM: Based on the ADC instances selected for onboarding, ADM guides you with the onboarding process. By default, built-in agent is selected for auto-onboarding.

  7. ADM GUI dashboard: After onboarding completes, you are guided to the ADM instance dashboard.

Note

This workflow is rolled out (GA) in a phased manner, through canary release. You receive an email when this feature is available in your ADM service environment.

For more details on each of these onboarding methods, see Onboard Citrix ADC instances using Citrix ADM service connect.

Low-touch onboarding of Citrix ADC instances using Citrix ADM service connect
March 16, 2021
Contributed by: 
S
March 16, 2021
Contributed by: 
S

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