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Low-touch onboarding of NetScaler instances using Console Advisory Connect

January 8, 2024
Contributed by: 
C

As your hybrid multi-cloud (HMC) infrastructure grows, the challenges to manage, monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot NetScaler instances become multifold. A centralized controller providing visibility into your complete infrastructure and all the applications running on it becomes the need of the hour.

In today’s world, onboarding your instances to a central controller needs to be done in a fast, easy, and low-touch manner. Keeping this need in mind, NetScaler Console launches a new onboarding workflow , which provides you a faster way to get complete visibility into your HMC deployment.

Overview: components of NetScaler Console onboarding workflow

The building blocks of this workflow are two ADC-side components: NetScaler service connect and Call Home.

  • Console Advisory Connect: it is a new feature in NetScaler that helps enable seamless onboarding of NetScaler instances onto NetScaler Console. This feature lets the NetScaler instance automatically connect with NetScaler Console and send system, usage, and telemetry data to NetScaler Console. Based on this data, the NetScaler Console gives you insights and recommendations on your NetScaler infrastructure. Such as quick identification of performance issues, high resource usage, and critical errors.

    Console Advisory Connect is available on the following NetScaler versions:

  • Call Home: it is an existing feature in ADC, which periodically monitors the instances and automatically uploads data to the Citrix technical support server. For more details, see Call Home. The data collected by Call Home is also routed to NetScaler Console to enable this new workflow.

All NetScaler instances with internet connectivity or Call Home, or instances enabled with NetScaler Console connect are connected to NetScaler Console. NetScaler Console starts collecting relevant metrics from these NetScaler instances through Call Home route, NetScaler Console connect route, or both. For more information, see Data governance for MPX and VPX instances and Data governance for SDX instances.

Using this data, NetScaler Console creates an inventory of NetScaler instances for every customer (unique org ID), which shows you a consolidated list of your NetScalerinstances. NetScaler Console also uses this data to create insights on your NetScaler and Gateway instances, which give meaningful insights into your HMC deployments, identifies issues, and recommends actions to mitigate the issues. Before you can mitigate the issues, you must onboard the NetScalerinstances to NetScaler Console.

You can check Select NetScaler and Gateway instances to onboard and select the NetScaler instances you want to onboard to NetScaler Console. After you start, you are guided to the onboarding process.

The auto-onboarding process uses Console Advisory Connect, which makes the experience automated, seamless, and faster. For NetScaler instances on versions that do not support Console Advisory Connect and auto-onboarding, NetScaler Console provides script-based onboarding, which is a semi-automated process.

Notes

  • The auto and script-based onboarding use a built-in agent. However, this workflow also gives you the flexibility to use an external agent for onboarding. You can use the external agent-based onboarding if you want to use pooled licensing or the complete analytics suite in NetScaler Console. Or if you want both use pooled licensing and the complete analytics suite. The built-in agent supports only management and monitoring.

  • The metrics collected by Console Advisory Connect are directly sent to the NetScaler Console service endpoint. Even if the NetScaler is a managed/discovered NetScaler on NetScaler Console and an external agent has been configured for that ADC, the metrics are sent directly from NetScalerto the NetScaler Console service endpoint and are not routed through through the external agent.

A quick tour of onboarding

Your first touchpoint in the onboarding journey is a product-initiated email. Here’s a quick tour of the onboarding journey:

  1. A NetScaler product-initiated email: You receive an email from NetScaler Console showing some key insights of your NetScaler infrastructure and inviting you to get started with NetScaler Console. Click Onboard to ADM Service in the email. The Citrix Cloud page appears.

  2. In the Citrix Cloud login page:

    • If you are an existing Citrix Cloud customer, sign in to Citrix Cloud using your credentials of Citrix.com, My Citrix, or Citrix Cloud.

    • If you are not an existing Citrix Cloud customer, sign up to Citrix Cloud. For more information, see Signing Up for Citrix Cloud.

    Notes

    • If you are part of multiple Org IDs and one of the Org IDs is in Citrix Cloud, sign in using your existing credentials. Then, complete the onboarding workflow for the new Org ID.

    • You can enable or disable the email notifications that you receive as part of Console Advisory Connect based low-touch onboarding workflow. For more information, see Email Settings.

  3. NetScaler Console welcome page: You get an overview of NetScaler Console and its benefits.

  4. Insights on your NetScaler and Gateway instances: You get detailed insights into your overall NetScaler infrastructure including security advisory (advice on current NetScaler CVEs), upgrade advisory (advice based on EOM/EOL timelines), key metrics, trends, and highlights the issues affecting NetScalerperformance and health and recommends way to mitigate the issues.

  5. Select NetScaler and Gateway instances to onboard: You get a consolidated view of your NetScalerinventory. You can select which NetScalerinstances you want to onboard to NetScaler Console.

  6. Onboard NetScaler instances to NetScaler Console: Based on the NetScalerinstances selected for onboarding, NetScaler Console guides you with the onboarding process. By default, the built-in agent is selected for auto-onboarding.

  7. NetScaler Console GUI dashboard: After onboarding completes, you are guided to the NetScaler Console instance dashboard.

For more details on each of these onboarding methods, see Onboard NetScaler instances using NetScaler Console connect.

Low-touch onboarding of NetScaler instances using Console Advisory Connect
January 8, 2024
Contributed by: 
C
January 8, 2024
Contributed by: 
C

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