Citrix NetScaler Monitoring with eG Enterprise

Citrix NetScaler Monitoring

From being a simple load balancer, Citrix NetScaler has evolved into a networking powerhouse, supporting a variety of functions including application firewalls, VPN tunnels, caching and acceleration, compression, and ensuring fast and secure delivery of web and desktop applications to any device and any location. Since it plays a central role in any network, the availability and performance of a Citrix NetScaler device is not only crucial for ensuring great user experience for web and Citrix users, but more importantly, it is critical for safeguarding the security and sanctity of the IT infrastructure.

Challenges

For remote users, Citrix NetScaler is a gateway to key applications and desktops. All accesses pass through the device. Therefore, any slowdown in performance or unavailability of the NetScaler device affects the user experience and it is essential to monitor the health, performance and utilization of all Citrix NetScaler devices in an infrastructure. The Citrix NetScaler admin console can be used; but looking at each of the NetScaler device’s consoles manually and analysing the metrics is a laborious and time-consuming task.

Further, since it handles all user sessions, a Citrix NetScaler device is also able to offer interesting insights into usage and performance of applications and desktops accessed through it. Citrix NetScaler monitoring must include monitoring of the NetScaler device as well as analysis of application flows processed by each NetScaler device.

Features

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  Answer Key NetScaler Performance Questions

  eG Enterprise is a Citrix Ready solution that monitors NetScaler to present actionable insight through real-time dashboards, alerts and performance reports. Using a combination of Citrix NetScaler NITRO APIs, SNMP and syslog messages, eG Enterprise collects metrics about all aspects of Citrix NetScaler’s functioning. With eG Enterprise, administrators can get answers at their fingertips for key Citrix NetScaler performance questions across various categories:

  User activity	How many ICA sessions and secure gateway sessions are active through the Citrix NetScaler device, from which users, and for how long? Who are the top ICA session users? Are user logon errors happening?
  Load balancing	Are all the NetScaler-supported virtual servers up and available? Is the load (connections, data traffic, etc.) being distributed evenly across the virtual servers in a load balancing group?
  Compression and caching	What is the bandwidth saving from compression? How well is caching working? Are there many misses from the cache? What is the bandwidth saving from caching?
  Capacity analysis and right-sizing	Is there sufficient global memory on a NetScaler device? Are any of the Citrix NetScaler devices under-sized? Is a Citrix NetScaler right-sized from a CPU usage perspective for the workload it is handling?

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  Monitoring Network Traffic and Security

  eG Enterprise auto-discovers VLANs configured and tracks traffic through each VLAN. It also monitors sessions to reverse network address translated (RNAT) servers and VPN sessions enabled by the NetScaler device. Administrators are automatically alerted to issues such as packet drops, packet collisions, bridge loops, discards, errors, stalls, hangs, and more. Administrators also have visibility into the traffic to and from the NetScaler device for different protocols, including IP, TCP, UDP, DNS, HTTP and SSL.

  eG Enterprise helps you ensure secure connectivity to the infrastructure by detecting and alerting on failed authentications, tracking the effectiveness of application firewall profiles configured, and isolating policy labels that are frequently invoked by the NetScaler appliance. Administrators are alerted to different forms of security attacks including SQL injection, XML denial of service, cross-site scripting, etc. Critical errors reported in syslog messages are also flagged.

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  Cross-tier Performance Analysis and Bottleneck Detection

  eG Enterprise provides single-pane-of-glass, cross-tier visibility into the entire Citrix infrastructure. With eG Enterprise, you can:

  • Detect situations where the Citrix NetScaler device itself has become a performance bottleneck
  • Easily drill down into the infrastructure (server, virtualization, storage, network) supporting Citrix tiers.
  • Visualize the entire service delivery infrastructure on topology maps, and use automated diagnosis to pinpoint the exact root cause of Citrix issues

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• 

  Integrate with Citrix NetScaler Insight for User Experience Analysis

  One of the most common challenges with Citrix performance is slowness of access. When slowness is detected, is the issue due to the Citrix infrastructure or could it be caused by a poor network connection from the user end? eG Enterprise answers this question by integrating with Citrix NetScaler Insight Center. This integration provides detailed insights about web application and virtual desktop sessions being supported by Citrix NetScaler and NetScaler SD-WAN devices. With this integration, administrators can:

  • Track the HDX round-trip time (RTT) for every virtual application or desktop session
  • Further, breakdown latency into WAN latency and data center (DC) latency; WAN latency issues highlight connection issues at the user-end
  • Review client-side and server-side jitter values that provide additional insight into where the cause of user experience issues can lie

  This insight is critical for empowering Citrix administrators and helpdesks to quickly troubleshoot complaints of slowness in minutes.

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Benefits

• Ensure high uptime and performance of Citrix NetScaler devices.
• Achieve efficient load balancing of Citrix Application Delivery Controller.
• Ensure secure application delivery via NetScaler Unified Gateway.
• Receive proactive alerts whenever performance and usage breaches auto-determined baselines.
• Get true end-to-end visibility for rapid diagnosis and troubleshooting.
• Unified licensing reduces cost of purchasing different point solutions and add-ons.
• Leverage your investments in Citrix NetScaler Insight Center: eG Enterprise works in tandem and provides deeper monitoring visibility.

Why eG? One Monitor to Manage All of IT.

• eG Enterprise is the only single pane-of-glass, virtualization-aware, auto-diagnostic IT infrastructure performance monitor
• Gain actionable answers to performance issues, wherever they originate, from application code to bare metal
• Understand the impact of infrastructure issues on application performance and user experience
• Unify IT performance monitoring, alerting, diagnosing, reporting, and capacity-planning in a single console
• Ensure a great user experience and dramatically improve IT efficiency
• Benefit from flexible deployment options (on-premises and SaaS) and IT monitoring approaches (agentless and agent-based)