30 days of training on Citrix ADM! Day 27: Peak and Lean usage

I am back, it is day 27.

Widget Heavy Industries has developed a new widget, it has some unique properties and is made from some exotic materials. That is not all, this widget is capable of operating in some harsh environments. The uses for such an object are many.

The problem is keeping up with demand, as EVERYBODY wants it.

Their website is the primary go-to-market option to sell the new widgets. The website is busy and mission-critical!

Jim, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to work out when the site can be taken out for maintenance and updates. As ever, if you or any of your co-workers are caught out taking the site down at the wrong time, Christmas will be canceled.

Yikes! We need some help!

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, the overview & Gateway insights dashboards, On-Prem vs cloud ADM, A+ SSL ratings and time travel.

Today is all about Peak and Lean usage

Honestly, what are you talking about?

Websites can carry vast amounts of business, as such you need to pay careful attention to the loading metrics to best work out how the infrastructure is coping and when you are the busiest.

Everyone needs to be able to make decisions based on some data to better address the needs of their customers. This is all about giving the admin access to the right data to make the best call for changes to the platform.

So what? What problem does it solve?

Even the busiest websites need time for updates and changes, depending on how big you are that might be a tough thing to work out. Citrix ADM can help you out, it does this by working out when you are hitting the peaks and also dropping to the lows in usage.

Loading might need to expand capacity, and relatively low loading might allow the admin time to address maintenance issues.

Who would use this?

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

What does ADM offer to help this?

Click an application from the App Dashboard and select the Key Metrics tab to visualize the consolidated view of all the (key?) metrics. Select the time duration from the list to analyze the metrics.

Hers is a bunch of screenshots to show some simulated data.

Here is response time, requests, throughput and 500 error count

Server and client connections, data volume and application CPU usage.

lastly, there is encryption stats and session hits.

Lean usage

Ok, smarty pants, when can I get the server down and do some maintenance? Just click an application from the App Dashboard and select the Key Metrics tab to see the lean figures. The following example is to analyze the downtime for the 1-hour duration.

How are you fixed for Thursday at 3.00 pm?

Click the Total Requests, Throughput, or Data Volume tab to view details for the top 5 least loaded periods.

Summary

Getting a way to see application usage can be very handy. This helps you make better data driven decisions about website scaling with the associated infrastructure changes and times for general maintenance.

This is just one less thing to worry about when it comes to infrastructure management. You never know when you might need to add extra capacity, but you can get better insight with ADM. This all helps keep things running smoothly.

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 reason to run ADM as a service.

It is free too.

What’s not to like?