Application Delivery Management

Poll Citrix ADC instances and entities

The network functions feature in Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) enables you to monitor the state of the entities configured on your managed Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) instances. You can view statistics such as transaction details, connection details, and throughput of a load balancing virtual server. You can also enable or disable the entities when you plan a maintenance.

Citrix ADM must poll managed instances at set times in a day to collect statistical information such as state, HTTP requests per second, CPU usage, memory usage, and throughput.

The different types of polling that Citrix ADM performs on the managed instances are listed as below:

  • Global polling of instances

  • Manual polling of instances

  • Manual polling of entities

Global polling of instances

Citrix ADM automatically polls all the managed instances in the network depending on the interval configured by you. Though the default polling interval is 30 minutes, you can set the interval depending on your requirements.

To configure global polling of all Citrix ADC instances in Citrix ADM:

  1. In Citrix ADM, navigate to Networks > Network Functions > Settings.

  2. On the Network Functions page, select Configure Polling Interval for Entities from the Select Action list.

  3. On the Configure Polling Interval page, set the interval (in minutes) for automatic polling of instances. The default polling interval is 30 minutes.

  4. Click Continue to close the page.

Manual polling of instances

When Citrix ADM is managing a large number of entities, the polling cycle takes a longer time to generate the report that might result in a blank screen or the system might still display earlier data.

In Citrix ADM, there is a minimum polling interval period when automatic polling does not happen. If you add a new Citrix ADC instance, or if an entity is updated, Citrix ADC does not recognize the new instance or the updates made to an entity until the next polling happens. And, there is no way to immediately get a list of virtual IP addresses for further operations. You must wait for the minimum polling interval period to elapse. Though you can do a manual poll to discover newly added instances, this leads to the entire Citrix ADC network to be polled, which creates a heavy load on the network. Instead of polling the entire network, Citrix ADM now allows you to poll only selected instances and entities at any given time.

Citrix ADM automatically polls managed instances to collect information at set times in a day. Selected polling reduces the refresh time that Citrix ADM requires to display the most recent status of the entities bound to these selected instances.

To poll specific instances in Citrix ADM:

  1. In Citrix ADM, navigate to Networks > Network Functions.

  2. On Network Functions page, at the top right-hand corner, click Poll Now.

  3. The pop-up page Poll Now provides you an option to poll all Citrix ADC instances in the network or poll the selected instances.

    1. All Instances tab - click Start Polling to poll all the instances

    2. Select Instances tab - select the instances from the list and click Start Polling.

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Citrix ADM initiates manual polling and adds all the entities.

Manual polling of entities

Citrix ADM also allows you to poll only a few selected entities that are bound to a particular instance. For example, you can use this option to know the latest status of a particular entity in an instance. In such a case, you need not poll the instance as a whole to know the status of one updated entity. When you select and poll an entity, NCitrix ADM polls only that entity and updates the status in the Citrix ADM GUI.

Consider an example of a virtual server being DOWN. The state of that virtual server might have changed to UP before the next automatic polling happens. To view the changed status of the virtual server, you might want to poll only that virtual server so that the correct state is displayed on the GUI immediately.

You can now poll the following entities for any update in their status: services, service groups, load balancing virtual servers, cache reduction virtual servers, content switching virtual servers, authentication virtual servers, VPN virtual servers, GSLB virtual servers, and application servers.

Note

If you poll a virtual server, only that virtual server is polled. The associated entities such as services, service groups, and servers are not polled. If you need to poll all associated entities, you must manually poll the entities or you must poll the instance.

To poll specific entities in Citrix ADM:

As an example, this task assists you to poll load balancing virtual servers. Similarly, you can poll other network function entities too.

  1. In Citrix ADM, navigate to Networks > Network Functions > Load Balancing > Virtual Servers.

  2. Select the virtual server that shows the state as DOWN, and click Poll Now. The status of the virtual server now changes to UP.

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Poll Citrix ADC instances and entities