The whole industry is moving to the cloud and Citrix is leading the way.
Not only are applications moving to the cloud but the components which make up applications are getting more numerous. Applications are increasingly deployed between on-premise datacenters, private clouds and public clouds.
The fact is that the app deployment landscape is becoming increasingly complex as cloud-native applications are deployed and as existing applications move to the cloud. This has the following implications:
* Critical provisioning, configuration and management tasks must be automated. App workloads need to scale up and scale down, not just in one cloud environment but across the hybrid cloud.
* The application delivery environment can provide a rich set of data about apps, users and devices. However, because of the complexity and sheer quantity of the data, powerful advanced analytics tools are required to truly harness the data for application performance management, troubleshooting and security threat mitigation.
* Finally, the mapping of applications to infrastructure must be established and maintained throughout the lifecycle so that applications can always be managed end-to-end wherever they are deployed.
Citrix introduced NetScaler MAS to address these requirements. NetScaler MAS is a software product which provides network management, analytics, and orchestration. From a single platform, administrators can view, automate, and manage network services for scale-out application architectures.
In summary, NetScaler MAS provides:
* Central Management for Operational Efficiency: NetScaler MAS automates administrative tasks such as provisioning, configuration management and certificate management to save time and eliminate human errors. NetScaler MAS also integrates easily with cloud orchestration and SDN software.
* Visibility and Analytics: NetScaler MAS harnesses the rich real-time data in the network, allowing you to proactively identify and fix issues as well as detect and address security threats.
* App-Centric Lifecycle Management: NetScaler MAS maintains an application-centric view across all your delivery infrastructure
In Release 12.0 MAS introduces real-time analytics with machine-learning and anomaly detection. This helps administrators proactively identify and rapidly troubleshoot application performance and security issues across the application infrastructure
NetScaler MAS provides the ability to map applications to infrastructure. You can create a mapping of applications to the underlying network and use this to drive app-centric performance management, troubleshooting and security.
In particular, you can capture all the network and infrastructure details of an application in declarative templates called Stylebooks.
You can create a Stylebook for configuring a specific feature of NetScaler, or you can use Stylebooks to create configurations for an enterprise application deployments such as Microsoft Exchange or Lync.
Once this application mapping is established, a rich set of tools are available to manage your application environment:
Application health scores have been introduced in Release 12.0 to summarize how well an application is performing, based on industry standard APDEX scoring of user satisfaction as well as other performance metrics and assessment of security threats.
Also new for Release 12.0, the application dashboard integrates the application health score and threat visibility to provide a powerful way to manage all aspects of application performance.
Also in Release 12.0 the App Activity Investigator functionality provides access to advanced analytics features. Transactions are monitored and machine learning techniques are applied to establish normal traffic patterns. These are then used to identify anomalies which can be used in combination with other MAS tools to ensure optimum performance and troubleshoot issues faster.
NetScaler MAS also provides application based highly-granular role-based access control, you can safely and securely provide application visibility and management to different user groups.
Also new in 12.0, you can use Stylebooks to provide application-centric integration with orchestration and other external systems.
Finally, in addition to the NetScaler portfolio NetScaler MAS 12.0 also now manages HA Proxy.
This is just a brief summary of some of the many new app-centric and advanced analytics features of NetScaler MAS Release 12.0 which will help accelerate your adoption of the hybrid cloud.
If you are attending Citrix Synergy in Orlando come to SYN122 “Whats New with NetScaler Management and Analytics” on Wednesday May 24th at 3.45pm to learn more about the rich set of functionality offered by NetSCaler MAS.
Otherwise ask your sales specialist for more information or download NetScaler MAS and try it out!
You may also consider attending this Citrix webinar: “Hybrid Cloud Basics- Get Control & Visibility for All your Apps” on May 31st. Register here
