Recently, I was meeting with a customer to talk about their plans for application management and monitoring. The apps we were discussing were a mix of web, SaaS, virtual, and cloud native and were deployed on-prem and in public and private clouds. No matter where the conversation went, we always ended up talking about user experience. How could they ensure a great user experience for these disparate apps?
As we got deeper into the discussion, the following questions came up:
- How could they ensure their applications were performing well?
- What could they do to prevent infrastructure-related issues, like network connectivity?
- Could they avoid disruptions related to cloud-native services?
Citrix ADC gives IT admins complete visibility into what users are accessing, how applications are performing (including network latency from both the client and server sides), the back-end server’s performance, application response time, and so much more. And it delivers this visibility for traditional and cloud native apps hosted on-prem or in public, private, or hybrid clouds.
Citrix ADC generates data — transactions, events and sessions, and more — as network traffic passes through it. Citrix Application Delivery Management (Citrix ADM) collects and processes this data, which provides visibility to the IT admin about app performance, user access patterns and behaviors, Citrix ADC’s health, and the back-end server’s performance, as well as insights into SSL-related traffic.
Citrix ADM provides a unique value proposition to customers who need visibility into apps served by Citrix ADCs. With Citrix ADM’s cutting-edge machine learning capabilities and cross-customer learning using Citrix ADC Call Home, IT admins get rich, actionable data sets.
Users’ interaction with apps involves many hops, as shown in the image below. Each segment provides set of measurable data that can showcase:
- How a user’s experience is while accessing different applications.
- How the network is performing from the user (or client side) to backend servers.
- How ADCs are processing the traffic and what the overall health looks like.
- How applications are performing while serving the user’s requests.
Citrix ADM’s features and functionality, from monitoring and management to orchestration and analytics, can help you to leverage this data and are available on-prem and in the cloud. The best part of the offering: The APIs include feature parity between on-prem and cloud (with a few exceptions). This helps IT admins to have a seamless user experience, to protect corporate investments, and to enable hassle-free migration from on-prem to cloud.
As we talked through Citrix ADM’s features and functionality with the customer, we focused on recent innovations in the following areas:
- Managing and monitoring application performance using Intelligent App Analytics
- Operational agility using Infrastructure Analytics
- Service Graph (for cloud native)
Intelligent App Analytics delivers insights into many aspects of an application, from performance and usage to health and user experience. Citrix ADM’s application dashboard gives IT admins a bird’s-eye view of apps, throughput, errors, response time, request count, usage, client connection, and more. It also shows the apps status and any related issues.
Users can click on any of the apps in the dashboard to get details on the data set, including response time, errors, throughput, connection, and data volume. Citrix ADM empowers IT admins with insights to help detect potential problems before they happen, even offering possible solutions. Through built-in intelligence like server response time, Citrix ADM supports monitoring of key performance metrics to help you avoid performance degradation and other challenges.
Infrastructure issues can also degrade application performance. Citrix ADM proactively monitors key infrastructure elements including CPU, memory of the ADC instance, network, SSL, and configuration. IT admins can troubleshoot and take corrective actions quickly, with Citrix ADM guiding them through the problems and assisting them in taking corrective actions like changing the configuation or applying a policy in Citrix ADC. Check out our Enhanced Infrastructure Analytics page to see the complete list of indicators available with Citrix ADM.
Finally, Citrix Service Graph depicts the communication flow from user to application when the apps are hosted in Kubernetes as a set of microservices. Cloud-native apps are made up of many services, and Citrix Service Graph gives you the service-to-service communication details, including performance metrics such as response time, error, throughput, and more. For details on service graph, check out my earlier blogs on untangling the complex web of microservices with Citrix Service Graph and Citrix Service Graph 101.
Our customer was excited to hear about the impact of Citrix ADM. Learn what Citrix ADM and Citrix Networking technologies can do for you.
