30 days of training on Citrix ADM! Day 28: App Performance Indicators

I am back, it is day 28.

The topic of load balancing seems pretty simple when you first take a look at it. I know what you are thinking, how can this be an exciting topic? Honestly, it is cooler than fancy trainers!

For example, let’s say I have three boxes on the back end, clients come on the web server front end, and they can drop on to any one of those three application servers to get access to the ticket application. That is pretty simple. Maybe, there is a need to stick clients onto one server, for the application to work.

We can do that, just add some persistence.

The thing is, it doesn’t take much for this to get much more complicated when a few more servers get added into the mix. How many do you think? Another 39! After all, 42 is a significant number.

Let’s say Pink Floyd decides to perform at Wembley for a one-off concert. Tickets get released at time x. I would guess that there will be a few people happy to get tickets to that. When the traffic spikes, you will need every bit of your infrastructure to step up and perform. No slackers!

Help me work out where the slackers are!

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, time travel and Peak & Lean usage.

Today is all about App performance indicators

Honestly, what are you talking about?

Pink Floyd tickets! Now that’s what I’m talking about. Traffic spikes can be the result of any number of events, when the demand surges how can you best understand if there are bottlenecks in your infrastructure?

Typically, you need to be all over the chain of events that the ticket buyers go through to be sure that they are not getting a problem at a certain part of the conversation. This could be just an early indicator that you will have problems down the line if you don’t take action now.

You need to be data-driven.

So what? What problem does it solve?

Having a way to see the Application performance indicators is key to understanding where you are.

For example, what if you have taken the decision to allocate a fixed amount of CPU capacity from the NetScaler, you then find that the thresholds that you have allocated are being exceeded.

It gives you notice that you will have do something to address it.

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?

ADM will track issues and flag them in the console. These are the parameters that it will flag

1. ·??????Response Time
2. ·??????Active Services
3. ·??????Average CPU Usage
4. ·??????Average application CPU Usage
5. ·??????Memory Usage
6. ·??????NIC Discards
7. ·??????Service Flaps
8. ·??????Server Response Time
9. ·??????Low session reuse
10. ·??????Improper Persistence Type
11. ·??????Unstable Server
12. ·??????SSL Real Time Traffic
13. ·??????Unusually Large HTTP packets
14. ·??????TCP reassembly queue limit hits
15. ·??????Surge Queue Buildup
16. ·??????SSL rating

I will pick out two and show what insight is offered on those.

Active Services

The number of services tells you how many servers can support the workload, ideally you will have quite a few of these. I suggested 42 above!

In this case ADM is flagging that there are a bunch off line, take a look at that.

ADC memory usage

This issue detects when the ADC memory usage for this application exceeds the configured threshold value. Click the Memory Usage tab to view the issue details.

What does it look like for Service flaps?

Here is a colleague covering another one of the performance indicators.

Summary

Getting details on how your infrastructure is performing can be very handy. This helps you make decisions about website scaling with the associated infrastructure changes and the support it needs to keep issues in check.

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. 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?