Introduction

The ADC appliance is a central point of control for all application traffic in the data center. It collects flow and user-session level information valuable for application performance monitoring, analytics, and business intelligence applications. It also collects web page performance data and database information.

AppFlow is a new flow export standard for finding data pertaining to applications and transactions in the network infrastructure.

AppFlow records contain standard NetFlow or IPFIX information, such as time stamps for the beginning and end of a flow, packet count, and byte count. AppFlow records also contain application-level information (such as HTTP URLs, HTTP request methods and response-status codes, server response time, and latency).

You can configure AppFlow on a ADC device. This ensures that AppFlow records are transmitted to an IPv4 collector, using the Internet Protocol Flow Information eXport (IPFIX) format. The collector is where these real-time analytics can be aggregated for providing administrators with greater visibility into application traffic utilization and performance.

eG Enterprise supports AppFlow monitoring. You can configure eG Enterprise to serve as an AppFlow collector for an AppFlow-enabled ADC device in your environment. This way, you can have eG Enterprise receive , process, and publish in its console, the application and session-level statistics that AppFlow provides. With the help of these analytics, administrators can closely scrutinize application/desktop session traffic (via HDX virtual channels) and traffic to/from web applications. In the process, administrators can measure the bandwidth used and latency experienced by user accesses to XenApp servers, XenDesktop virtual desktops, and web applications, and determine the root-cause of poor user experience.

For this purpose, eG Enterprise provides two specialized monitoring models - the Citrix ADC HDX AppFlow model and the ADC Web AppFlow model.

This topic elaborates on the Citrix ADC HDX AppFlow model only. For details regarding the ADC Web AppFlow model, refer to the Monitoring ADC Web AppFlow topic.

The Citrix ADC HDX AppFlow model aggregates the AppFlow metrics on session traffic that flows through HDX virtual channels, and provides useful insights into session performance. Using this topic, you can understand how to configure eG Enterprise as an AppFlow collector, what metrics it collects and reports for HDX virtual channel traffic, and how to interpret these analytics.