30 days of training on Citrix ADM! Day 23: Gateway Insight

I am back, it is day 23.

Yesterday was all about the Overview Dashboard, it has its fingers in many pies!

One of the things that came up was the fact that there are some drill-down dashboards that underpin the Overview Dashboard, I did not go into too many of those yesterday. The gateway module on the NetScaler is very popular for offering access to Citrix Virtualization environments.

I wanted to talk about the dashboard for that.

You have been selected for a training course in Citrix ADM, the goal is to provide you with enough information to be actually dangerous when talking to a customer or client. 30 days is a bit of an arbitrary number, but I am prepared to give you 2 minutes of material, can I get 2 minutes of your time?

I have talked about Fleet management, general analytics, security analytics, AI / ML, Stylebooks, Pooled Capacity, instance advisory upgrade, security advisory, Autoscaling, onboarding, RESTful API, CADS self-managed, Service Graph, Web Transaction Analytics, Config Jobs, Network Reporting, SSL Dashboard, RBAC, event handling, config drift, WAF learning and the overview dashboard.

Today is all about Gateway insight (another dashboard!).

Honestly, what are you talking about?

Having some details about your users’ success or failure when accessing Citrix apps is a handy superpower! You typically want this before the phone starts to ring.

So what? What problem does it solve?

Pulls together a bunch of items into one view. This includes information on endpoint scans, authentication, authorization, SSO, and application launch.

It also offers some specifics on how your gateway is being used, HDX or full tunnel for example. There are also some figures to show how many users are active.

Who would use this?

Almost any customer uses a few different NetScaler appliances within their infrastructure hosting gateway services. That’s everyone, right?

Can you have too many Dashboards?

I will say no, as otherwise, this would be a short piece!

When you have a gateway setup for external access, hook up Citrix ADM (there are some boxes to check, nothing too onerous - link ) and you then get this view:

It breaks out each of the key steps a user might take when accessing resources via the gateway. At each step, we have a tabbed view with further details on each. For example, EPA scans can be a bit cryptic, as we don’t want to be too helpful to people trying to break in. All the users see is ‘the computer said no’. The table has the EPA check on the right-hand side.

Give me another scenario!

Bob is a Citrix Gateway administrator monitoring Citrix Gateway appliances through Citrix ADM, he wants to see why Sally is unable to log in, or at what stage of the login process she has issues.

Bob checks the login error details in the following stages for Sally’s account:

1.??????Authentication

2.??????End-point analysis (EPA)

3.??????Single sign-on

Looking at the details of Sally’s failed session. Bob does a search in Citrix ADM, navigating to Gateway > Gateway Insight and, in the Search for Users text box, can specify her account. Bob can then read off what gateway insight sees to get Sally up and running.

Time intervals

The dashboards all are time linked, this allows the admin to choose a shorter or longer period to revise a view. They can be

1.??????1 Hour

2.??????1 day

3.??????1 week

4.??????1 month

Some samples

There is some simple view to say, hey you have 238 users on the gateway now. The bandwidth numbers on the demo system seem a bit off!

Also, it breaks out the applications, and LinkedIn is not getting much love!

Summary

NetScaler gateway is popular! By having ADM show the concise status of user issues in one view is pretty awesome. Insight into what the current status is can be very useful, as even if you are not the most skilled person in a team, it is quite easy to see when there are things that need fixing. Which if not addressed will affect service.

All of this will help you stay on top of your environment. With tools like this, you can save time and ensure that you get back to high-value tasks.

Ultimately, it is another killer feature that is enabled with ADM service.

It is free too.

What’s not to like?