Web Insight
Web Insight enables visibility to the administrators to monitor all web applications served by Citrix ADC instances. As an administrator, you can get an integrated and real-time monitoring of the applications from Citrix ADC instances. Web Insight provides critical information such as client network latency and server response time, ensuring to monitor and improve application performance. The data used for analytics is captured from each HTTP, HTTPS transactions that are processed by the Citrix ADC instance. The analytics data enables you to analyze the performance of Citrix ADC instances, application, URL, client, and server in your environment.
The following are some of the use cases you can view the data using Web Insight:
-
The list of clients that are experiencing high latency while accessing an application like SharePoint
-
The top application which had the most hits within an hour
-
The list of applications and URLs accessed from clients
-
The operating system and browser used by a particular client
-
The applications or servers that send the most error-related responses
-
Accessibility issues with one particular client
-
Accessibility issues across few or all application from a particular client
-
Few pages of an application are slow from a particular client and from backend server
-
Application is slow when accessed from a particular client and from backend server
You can enable Web Insight for a specific virtual server on a selected instance to monitor the traffic on your web application. The Web Insight feature then provides statistics for the virtual server in Citrix ADM. To enable the Web Insight:
-
Log on to Citrix ADM with administrator credentials.
-
Navigate to Networks > Instances > Citrix ADC, and select the Citrix ADC instance on which you want to enable analytics.
-
From the Select Action list, select Configure Analytics.
-
On the Configure Insight page:
-
Select the Application List for either Load Balancing or Content Switching.
-
Select the virtual server and click Enable AppFlow.
-
-
In the Enable AppFlow dialog box:
-
Enter true in the text box
-
Select Logstream as the transport mode
Note Citrix recommends you to select Logstream as the transport mode
-
Select Web Insight and click OK.
-
Analyze web application issues
One of the common issues that an administrator needs to identify is the latency issues. As an administrator, you need to find if the latency issue is from the server network, client network, or server response time. Using Citrix ADM, you can identify this information by navigating to Analytics > Web Insight.
When you navigate to Analytics > Web Insight, it displays the Citrix ADC instances that are enabled with Web Insight. You can view the detailed information for the instances such as IP address, hostname, total number of hits, and bandwidth.
Using the list, you can select the time duration to view the insights for the instances.
You can also use the slider to customize the time duration and click Go to display the results.
When you click on the graph or the IP address of the instance, the detailed information about the instance is displayed. You can view insights for the following:
-
Total number of hits
-
Bandwidth
-
Applications
-
Domains
-
URLs
-
HTTP Request Methods
-
HTTP Response Status
-
Clients
-
Servers
-
Operating Systems
-
User Agents
You can also select Web Insight entities for which you want to view reports on the GUI.
-
Navigate to Analytics > Web Insight > Settings.
-
Click Configure Analytics Data Record Logs.
-
Under Web Insight Report Settings, select the entities that you want to view reports on the GUI.
-
Click OK.
To drill-down for further analysis, you can click each insight category under Web Insight in the GUI. For example, if you want to check issues for the configured servers:
-
Navigate to Analytics > Web Insight > Servers.
-
The Servers page is displayed with all configured servers.
-
Click the IP address from the graph. You can also click the IP address from the table.
The detailed insight view for the selected server is displayed. From this view, you can check for multiple insights such as:
-
Total number of hits received by the server
-
Bandwidth
-
Server processing time
-
Server network latency
-
Virtual servers configured for the server
-
Total number of clients accessing the server
-
Total number of response codes provided by the server
-
Use case 1 - Internal server error
Consider a scenario that your users are experiencing inaccessibility error 500 for your web application. The error 500 (Not Found) is HTTP response status error that indicates an issue on the web server, but the server does not state the issue explicitly. To identify and drill-down to the actual issue:
-
Navigate to Analytics > Web Insight > Response Status.
The dashboard page is displayed. The dashboard provides you the metrics that you can use to analyze the success and failure of the HTTP transactions that are processed.
-
Click Not Found on the graph.
-
Scroll down to view the Servers graph, and from the Filter By list, select Server Network Latency.
The graph indicates that every application server had an issue in retrieving the web application and hence the response time for web server is increased. The issue can be with the web server not responding for any request from any server.
Use case 2 - User experiencing slowness in accessing the web application
Consider a scenario that your web application is hosted through 10 different web servers. When the application gets accessed by multiple users at the same time, one or more users may experience application slowness. As an administrator, you have to analyze the following scenarios to understand the root cause of the issue:
Scenario 1 - Server Processing Time:
When multiple requests hit the 10 web servers at a same time, the time taken to load the request differs based on:
-
Number of requests in the queue.
-
The bandwidth consumed by each request to process the HTTP transaction.
The server graph can help you understand the processing time of each server for the request processed by the servers. Similarly, the application graph displays the hits, response time, and the bandwidth consumed by each HTTP transaction.
-
Navigate to Analytics > Web Insight > Servers.
-
Select the server from the graph.
-
Click Server Processing Time to analyze the processing time of the server.
Scenario 2 - Client Latency:
The response time and the total number of hits for the application can be the reason for application access slowness. You can check the client network latency and analyze the metrics for the client network latency. To analyze the root cause:
-
Navigate to Analytics > Web Insight > Clients.
-
Select the client from the graph.
-
Click Client Network Latency to analyze the high latency.
In this example, as an administrator, you can see the issue root cause is from the client network because the client network latency indicates high.
Use case 3 - Slowness in accessing the web application
Consider a scenario that you have web servers for Windows users and web servers for Mac users, and your users are reporting slowness in accessing the web application. As an administrator, you are aware that you have:
-
Configured a content switching virtual server for Windows users.
-
Configured a content switching virtual server for Mac users.
-
Configured associated services bound to the virtual servers to redirect requests based on Windows and Mac users.
To analyze the root cause of the web application slowness issue:
-
Navigate to Analytics > Web Insight > Applications
-
Select the content switching virtual server. For example, the “CSTOLBTarget” application in the image is a content switching virtual server that is bound to other load balancing virtual servers
-
Click the content switching virtual server to view the other load balancing virtual server. You can also click the application name in the table.
You can further click the bound load balancing servers to view the Web Insight details of those applications.
Analyze insights for browsers and operating systems
You can use Web Insight to help you segregate L7 latency issues and understand mobile device usage uptake. As an administrator, the insight can help you to understand different operating system uptakes across your user base.
Navigate to Analytics > Web Insight > Operating system to see why there is slowness in user access and if it is due to incompatibility across certain browsers. You can also see which operating systems are being used across certain clients, and the browsers being accessed. You can compare the rendered time across the different browsers and further drill-down to particular a browser to identify which application pages are associated with the highest rendering time for that browser.
For example, you can select Google Chrome and see the corresponding rendering times for the different URL pages for a particular application.
Citrix ADC instances deployed in high availability mode
Citrix ADM provides reports for ADC instances that are deployed in high availability mode. Aggregated reports for instances in high availability mode are supported in all analytics.
You can click on the name of the instances that are in high availability to view more details.
Citrix ADC instances deployed in cluster mode
Citrix ADM provides reports for ADC instances that are deployed in cluster mode. Aggregated reports for instances in cluster mode are supported in all analytics.
You can also click the CLIP host name to view all details about the ADC instances that are deployed in a cluster mode.
Note
All data previously collected before you upgraded to Citrix ADM 12.1 build 503.x continues to be displayed as independent reports for the period until the data persists.
For ADC instances deployed in cluster mode, Observation Domain ID/Observation Domain Names are replaced by CLIP host name and CLIP. All data previously collected continues to report Observation Domain ID/Observation Domain Name.
Web Insight geomap configuration
Geomaps feature in Citrix ADM displays the usage of web applications across different geographical locations on a map. Administrators can use this information to understand the trends in application usage and for capacity planning.
Geomap provides information about the following metrics specific to a country, state, and city:
-
Total Hits: Total number of times an application is accessed.
-
Bandwidth: Total bandwidth consumed while serving client requests
-
Response Time: Average time taken to send responses to client requests.
Geomaps provide information which can be used to address several use cases such as the following:
-
Region that has the maximum number of clients accessing an application
-
Region that has the highest response time
-
Region that consumes the most bandwidth
Citrix ADM provides you an option to configure geomaps for private IP addresses or public IP addresses.
Configure geomaps for private IP addresses
To view the web application traffic originating from private IP addresses on the geomap, you must first create private IP address blocks and then enable geo data collection.
To enable the Geo Data Collection:
-
Navigate to Networks > Instances > Citrix ADC, and select the Citrix ADC instance.
-
From the Select Action list, select Configure Analytics.
-
On the Configure Insight page, select Enable Geo data collection for Web and HDX Insight.
Create a private IP block
Citrix ADM can recognize the location of a client when the client private IP address is added to the Citrix ADM server. For example, if the IP address of a client falls within the range of a private IP address block associated with City A, Citrix ADM recognizes that the traffic is originating from City A for this client.
To create an IP block:
-
In Citrix ADM, navigate to Analytics > Settings > IP Blocks, and then click Add.
-
In Create IP Blocks page, specify the following parameters:
-
Name. Specify a name for the private IP block
-
Start IP address. Specify the lowest IP address range for the IP block.
-
End IP address. Specify the highest IP address range for the IP block.
-
Country. Select the country from the list.
-
Region. Based on the country, the region is auto-populated, but you can select your region.
-
City. Based on the region, the city is auto-populated, but you can select your city.
-
City Latitude and City Longitude. Based on the city you select, the latitude and longitude are auto-populated.
-
-
Click Create to finish.
Public IP blocks
Citrix ADM can also recognize the location of a client if the client uses public IP address. Citrix ADM has its built-in location CSV file that matches the location based on the client IP address range. For using public IP block, the only requirement is that you have to enable the Enable geo data collection from the Configure Insight page.
Note
Citrix ADM requires an internet connection to display the geomaps for a particular geographical location. Internet connection is also required to export the GeoMap in .pdf, .png, or .jpg formats.
To export the report of this dashboard:
To export the report of this page, click the Export icon on the top right side of this page. On the Export page, you can do one of the following:
-
Select Export Now tab. To view and save the report in PDF, JPEG, PNG, or CSV format.
-
Select Schedule Export tab. To schedule the report daily, weekly, or monthly and send the report over email or slack message.
Note
- If you select Weekly recurrence, ensure that you select the weekdays on which you want the report to be scheduled.
- If you select Monthly recurrence, ensure that you enter all the days that you want the report to be scheduled separated by commas.
Configure thresholds
You can create thresholds and get it notified whenever the threshold value breaches. In a typical deployment, you can set thresholds to:
-
Track various application metrics
-
Facilitate planning
-
Get notified whenever the applications metric value exceeds the set threshold
To configure threshold:
-
Navigate to Analytics > Settings > Thresholds.
-
On the Thresholds page, click Add.
The Create Threshold page is displayed.
-
Specify the following details:
-
Name - Specify a name for creating an event.
-
Traffic Type - From the list, select WEB.
-
Entity - From the list, select the category or the resource type. By default, “applications” is selected as the entity.
-
Reference Key - A reference key is automatically generated based on the traffic type and entity that you have selected.
-
Duration - From the list, select the time interval for which you want to monitor the entity. You can monitor the entities for an hour, or for a day, or for a week duration.
-
In the Configure Rule section, create a rule by choosing the metric, a required comparator, and provide a threshold value.
-
In the Notifications Settings section, select Enable Threshold and the alert mode for which you want to get the alerts.
-
-
Click Create.