Citrix ADM – One of the best tools for the Citrix ADC (Formally NetScaler) Monitoring

Enterprises which were using the Citrix ADC (Application Delivery Controller) many times need to depend on multiple 3^rd party tools to get the insight of their ADC Gateway for troubleshooting user issues in the VDI environment, which is a great challenge for Citrix Admins since ADC is generally managed by the network team in any enterprise and they have to depend on the input they receive from the network which usually postpone the quick resolution of the ticket. To resolve this kind of issue it’s advisable that in any large scale Citrix deployment the ADM should be deployed and it should be managed by the Citrix Admin Folks. This is one of the great tool available Citrix In-house and very helpful for the admins.

Now let’s see what is Citrix ADM? 

Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) is the only application delivery management platform that provides comprehensive automation, faster troubleshooting, and actionable insights. This capability happens all from a single pane of glass for all your application delivery controller (ADC) infrastructure across hybrid multi-cloud environments.

Citrix ADM is a centralized management solution that provides visibility and automates management jobs that need to be executed across multiple instances. Manage and monitor Citrix products such as: Citrix ADC MPX, Citrix ADC VPX, Citrix ADC SDX, Citrix ADC CPX, Citrix Gateway, and Citrix SD-WAN.

ADM is available both on-premises, and as a Cloud Service. For the Cloud Service, you import a ADM Agent appliance to an on-prem hypervisor, or deploy a ADM Agent to AWS or Azure. The ADM Agent is the broker between the Cloud Service and the on-prem (or cloud hosted) Citrix ADC appliances.

For a better understanding I have listed the following features of the ADM in the table below.

	Application Monitoring: Enables you to monitor the applications on your environment based on the virtual server status. Application Groups: Enables you to define applications based on the collection of virtual servers in Citrix ADM. You can create an application group of load balancing. Content Switching and GSLB virtual servers. Application Configuration: Enables you to optimize your application based on the predefined configuration template.
	Instances: Enables you to manage the Citrix ADC, Citrix ADC Gateway and Citrix ADC SDWAN Instances. Instance Group: Enables you to group your instances into static groups and Private IP blocks. Events: Provide the status of the instances managed in Citrix ADM. SSL Certificates : Provides Certificate Management. Configuration Jobs: Enable you to configure instances in multiple ways. Configuration Audit: Enables you to modify and identify anomalies across the configuration on your instances.
	Web Insight: Provides visibility and monitoring into the enterprise web applications served by the Citrix ADC. HDX Insight: Provides end to end visibility of the ICA traffic passing through the Citrix ADC. Gateway Insight: Provides failures that user encounters when logging on. Security Insight: Single pan solution that help to access application Network reporting: Allow you to create reports of network statistics.
	Cloud Orchestration: Enables integration of the Citrix ADC products with Open stack Cloud Integrations. Container Orchestration: Enable you to deploy, manage, monitor and gain visibility into your Citrix ADC VPX instance

Now for troubleshooting Citrix end user issues, Citrix ADM analytics feature will help the Citrix ADC administrator in various ways, so let’s see in details what detail you can get in ADM analytics which can help you in troubleshooting.

• Analytics: Web Insight into Citrix ADM:
  

  Using web insight on Citrix ADM, you can do the following:
  

  • View latency in Applications to see whether the issue is occurring on the server side of the network, the client side of the network, or on the application server itself.
    
  • Identify which application servers are currently generating erroneous response code, such as unauthorized, bad request or page not found.
    
  • Configure a threshold for a response time, If it is met, you will get a dashboard notification.
    
  • Segregate the L7 latency issues and mobile device usage uptake.
    
  • Analyze the end user experience by looking at metrics such as load time and render time.
    
• Analytics: Gateway Insight
  

  Using Gateway insight on Citrix ADM, you can do the following:

  • Gateway Insight provides visibility into the failures encountered by all users, regardless of access mode
  • You can view the EPA, authentication, single sign-on, and application launch failures for the gateway.
  • You can view the details of users associated with a gateway and their logon activity.
  • Users, sessions, bandwidth, and launch errors in total or per application.
  • All log messages are stored in the Citrix ADM database, so you can view the error details anytime.
• Analytics: HDX Insight
  

  Using HDX insight on Citrix ADM, you can do the following:

  • Successful user logons, latency and application-level details for the virtual ICA applications and desktops are visible
  • Which part of the network, such as DMZ or second DMZ, is causing a delay.
  • Which CVAD user consume the most bandwidth.
  • Which virtual channels consume the most bandwidth
  • Up-time and total number of launches of virtual application.

Now, let’s see some screenshot of Citrix ADM console. (Please note all the screenshot showing below is taken from Citrix Website configured for the ADM demo)

Fig 1: SSL Certificate Dashboard.

Fig 2: Issues with SSL certificates

Fig 3: Application License Dashboard

Fig 4: License Expiry Information.

Fig 5: ADC License usage information.

Fig 6: ADC Instance Dashboard

Fig 7: Application Dashboard

Fig 8: Services Dashboard

Fig 9: WAF Dashboard

Fig 10: WAF Violation Dashboard

That’s all for today, I hope you have liked my blog on Citrix ADM, this can be a very essential tool to monitor the Citrix ADC in the network layer irrespective of any Citrix resource layer and it also has a very short learning curve and any Citrix Admin can take care of this.

You have a great day ahead.