Application Delivery Management

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 back-end server

  • Application is slow when accessed from a particular client and from back-end 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 Web Insight:

If your Citrix ADM is 13.0 Build 41.x or later:

  1. Navigate to Networks > Instances > Citrix ADC, and select the instance type. For example, VPX.

  2. Select the instance and from Select Action list, click Configure Analytics.

  3. On the Configure Analytics on Virtual Server(s) page, select the virtual server, and click Enable Analytics.

  4. On the Enable Analytics window:

    1. Select Web Insight

    2. Select Logstream as Transport Mode

      Note

      For Citrix ADC 12.0 or earlier, IPFIX is the default option for Transport Mode. For Citrix ADC 12.0 or later, you can either select Logstream or IPFIX as Transport Mode.

      For more information about IPFIX and Logstream, see Logstream overview.

    3. The Expression is true by default

    4. Click OK

      Enabling analytics

      Note

      • If you select virtual servers that are not licensed, then Citrix ADM first licenses those virtual servers and then enables analytics

      • For admin partitions, only Web Insight is supported

      • For virtual servers such as Cache Redirection, Authentication, and GSLB, you cannot enable analytics. An error message is displayed.

After you click OK, Citrix ADM processes to enable analytics on the selected virtual servers.

Processing analytics

If your Citrix ADM is 13.0 Build 36.27 or earlier:

  1. Navigate to Networks > Instances > Citrix ADC, and select the Citrix ADC instance on which you want to enable analytics.

  2. From the Select Action list, select Configure Analytics.

    Configure analytics

  3. On the Configure Insight page:

    1. Select the Application List for either Load Balancing or Content Switching.

      Application list

    2. Select the virtual server and click Enable AppFlow.

      Virtual server

  4. 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.

      Transport mode

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, host name, total number of hits, and bandwidth.

Web issues

Using the list, you can select the time duration to view the insights for the instances.

Time duration

You can also use the slider to customize the time duration and click Go to display the results.

Slider

When you click 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

    Hits

  • Bandwidth

    Bandwidth

  • Applications

    Applications

  • Domains

    Domains

  • URLs

    URLs

  • HTTP Request Methods

    HTTP request methods

  • HTTP Response Status

    HTTP response status

  • Clients

    Clients

  • Servers

    Servers

  • Operating Systems

    Operating system

  • User Agents

    User agents

You can also select Web Insight entities for which you want to view reports on the GUI.

  1. Navigate to Analytics > Web Insight > Settings.

  2. Click Configure Analytics Data Record Logs.

    Analytics data

  3. Under Web Insight Report Settings, select the entities that you want to view reports on the GUI.

    Report

  4. 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:

  1. Navigate to Analytics > Web Insight > Servers.

  2. The Servers page is displayed with all configured servers.

  3. Click the IP address from the graph. You can also click the IP address from the table.

    IP address

    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:

  1. 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.

  2. Click Not Found on the graph.

    Not found

  3. Scroll down to view the Servers graph, and from the Filter By list, select Server Network Latency.

    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.

  1. Navigate to Analytics > Web Insight > Servers.

  2. Select the server from the graph.

  3. Click Server Processing Time to analyze the processing time of the server.

    Processing time

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:

  1. Navigate to Analytics > Web Insight > Clients.

  2. Select the client from the graph.

  3. Click Client Network Latency to analyze the high latency.

    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:

  1. Navigate to Analytics > Web Insight > Applications

  2. 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

    Load balancing server

  3. Click the content switching virtual server to view the other load balancing virtual server. You can also click the application name in the table.

    CS server

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.

Browsers

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.

HA mode

You can click the name of the instances that are in high availability to view more details.

HA 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.

Cluster

You can also click the CLIP host name to view all details about the ADC instances that are deployed in a cluster mode.

CLIP name

Note

  • All data previously collected before you upgraded to Citrix ADM 12.1 build 503.x remains 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 geo map 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.

Geo map 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

Note

The following procedure is applicable only if your Citrix ADM is 13.0 Build 36.27 or earlier. For Citrix ADM 13.0 Build 41.x or later, geo data collection is automatically enabled when you enable Web Insight.

To view the web application traffic originating from private IP addresses on the geo map, you must first create private IP address blocks and then enable geo data collection.

To enable the Geo Data Collection:

  1. Navigate to Networks > Instances > Citrix ADC, and select the Citrix ADC instance.

  2. From the Select Action list, select Configure Analytics.

    Configure analytics

  3. On the Configure Insight page, select Enable Geo data collection for Web and HDX Insight.

    Geo data

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:

  1. In Citrix ADM, navigate to Analytics > Settings > IP Blocks, and then click Add.

  2. 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.

  3. Click Create to finish.

    IP block

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.

Geo map

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:

  1. Select Export Now tab. To view and save the report in PDF, JPEG, PNG, or CSV format.

  2. 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:

  1. Navigate to Analytics > Settings > Thresholds.

  2. On the Thresholds page, click Add.

    The Create Threshold page is displayed.

  3. Specify the following details:

    1. Name - Specify a name for creating an event.

    2. Traffic Type - From the list, select WEB.

    3. Entity - From the list, select the category or the resource type. By default, “applications” is selected as the entity.

    4. Reference Key - A reference key is automatically generated based on the traffic type and entity that you have selected.

    5. 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.

      Web threshold

    6. In the Configure Rule section, create a rule by choosing the metric, a required comparator, and provide a threshold value.

      Threshold metric

    7. In the Notifications Settings section, select Enable Threshold and the alert mode for which you want to get the alerts.

      Web notification

  4. Click Create.

Troubleshoot Web Insight issues

For details, see the troubleshooting document Troubleshoot Web Insight issues.