Application Visibility Feature

Sep 04, 2013

• NetScaler Insight Center

  NetScaler Insight Center is a high performance collector that provides end-to-end user experience visibility across Web and HDX (ICA) traffic. It collects HTTP and ICA AppFlow records generated by NetScaler ADC appliances and populates analytical reports covering Layer 3 to Layer 7 statistics. NetScaler Insight Center provides in-depth analysis for the last five minutes of real-time data, and for historical data collected for the last one hour, one day, one week, and one month. HDX (ICA) analytic dashboard enables you to drill down from HDX Users, Applications, Desktops, and even from gateway-level information. Similarly, HTTP analytics provide a bird’s eye view of Web Applications, URLs Accessed, Client IP Addresses and Server IP Addresses, and other dashboards. The administrator can drill down and identify the pain points from any of these dashboards, as appropriate for the use case.

• EdgeSight for NetScaler

  Support for application performance monitoring based on end user experience. This solution leverages the HTML injection feature to obtain various time values, which are used by EdgeSight server for analysis and report generation. EdgeSight for NetScaler provides a way to monitor the performance benefits of a NetScaler and determine potential bottlenecks in a network.

  For more information, see “EdgeSight Monitoring for NetScaler.”

• Enhanced Application Visibility Using AppFlow

  The Citrix NetScaler appliance is a central point of control for all application traffic in the data center. It collects flow and user-session level information valuable for application performance monitoring, analytics, and business intelligence applications. AppFlow transmits this information by using the Internet Protocol Flow Information eXport (IPFIX) format, which is an open Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard defined in RFC 5101. IPFIX (the standardized version of Cisco’s NetFlow) is widely used to monitor network flow information. AppFlow defines new Information Elements to represent application-level information.

  Using UDP as the transport protocol, AppFlow transmits the collected data, called flow records, to one or more IPv4 collectors. The collectors aggregate the flow records and generate real-time or historical reports.

  AppFlow provides visibility at the transaction level for HTTP, SSL, TCP, and SSL_TCP flows. You can sample and filter the flow types that you want to monitor.

  To limit the types of flows to monitor, by sampling and filtering the application traffic, you can enable AppFlow for a virtual server. AppFlow can also provide statistics for the virtual server.

  You can also enable AppFlow for a specific service, representing an application server, and monitor the traffic to that application server.

  For more information, see “AppFlow.”

• Stream Analytics

  The performance of your web site or application depends on how well you optimize the delivery of the most frequently requested content. Techniques such as caching and compression help accelerate the delivery of services to clients, but you need to be able to identify the resources that are requested most frequently, and then cache or compress those resources. You can identify the most frequently used resources by aggregating real-time statistics about website or application traffic. Statistics such as how frequently a resource is accessed relative to other resources and how much bandwidth is consumed by those resources help you determine whether those resources need to be cached or compressed to improve server performance and network utilization. Statistics such as response times and the number of concurrent connections to the application help you determine whether you must enhance server-side resources.

  If the web site or application does not change frequently, you can use products that collect statistical data, and then manually analyze the statistics and optimize the delivery of content. However, if you do not want to perform manual optimizations, or if your web site or application is dynamic in nature, you need infrastructure that can not only collect statistical data but can also automatically optimize the delivery of resources on the basis of the statistics. On the NetScaler appliance, this functionality is provided by the Stream Analytics feature. The feature operates on a single NetScaler appliance and collects run-time statistics on the basis of criteria that you define. When used with NetScaler policies, the feature also provides you with the infrastructure that you need for automatic, real-time traffic optimization.

  For more information, see “Stream Analytics.”