Visibility is the word we come across everyday immaterial of the business we do. Huge amount of information is processed in different forms and what we need is deep visibility into what got processed, what changed, what is new, how does it impact and finally what was my end user experience in this whole process.

In our Application centric world the visibility challenges are more and they grow as the complexity of applications and deployments grow. Big enterprises run with hundreds of applications for daily routine job and there is no single consolidated way to get all the visibility information. Various tools and techniques are used to get visibility information but they are complex and expensive too. Most of the enterprise Apps has a common requirement of being load balanced today and thus ADCs like NetScaler become the central node from where all App centric information travels. With given understanding of these core challenges and the need for visibility, NetScaler had introduced AppFlow as a new standard for defining and extracting visibility information from NetScaler. So NetScaler becomes the central node for information to travel and AppFlow becomes the standard for fetching out the visibility information. The only missing piece from our side was a product which can consume and analyze the AppFlow records received from NetScaler.

NetScaler Insight is the product introduced to fill the gap and complete the value chain of visibility needs. This product is responsible to collect the AppFlow records, analyze them and produce efficient analytical reports for end user consumption. With this we expect to cover all kinds of visibility needs for your Application infrastructure. NetScaler Insight provides all dimensions of visibility information for the Applications such that you just need to come to a central Dashboard and it gets you all the information for complete flow, starting from end clients to backend Application servers. When we interviewed several end users and customers on visibility needs, there were common questions and worry points and we believe all those will be solved with this product. The common questions and use cases this product can address are:

  • Real time analytics on Applications
  • Historical data aggregated at various level
  • What is happening through my NetScaler
  • Show me the top NetScaler devices
    • By hits
    • By bandwidth
  • Which are the top Applications
    • By hits
    • By bandwidth
    • By response time
  • How is my application performing
  • What is the average response time
  • Break up response time into meaningful chunks
    • Client network latency
    • Server network latency
    • Server processing time
  • Which are the top URLs within my App
  • What is the Load versus Render time for URLs
  • Waterfall chart for individual URLs and pages
  • Top URLs across all Applications
  • Distribution of HTTP request method
  • Distribution of HTTP response status
  • Distribution of Client OS and User-agent
  • Who are the top clients sending App requests
  • Who are the top servers responding to clients
  • Which all Apps particular client has accessed
  • Which client’s requests are resulting in 401 response
  • Which server is sending more 500 error responses
  • Which URL is resulting into most 302 redirects
  • Clients which are showing high latency for specific Apps
  • URL which is common across all Apps deployed
  • Which browser and OS combination is showing sluggishness
  • Which Client has the low and thin pipe causing latency
  • Which Application is not performing well due to server issues

 

There are several such questions which will be addressed by NetScaler Insight and its reporting capabilities. Key aspect is that this data is available in historical format with different levels of aggregation and one can always go back to dig deeper. Isn’t it exciting? :)

This product is full of features and capabilities and we will cover most of them here in this blog series to ensure that you understand the potential of this product and its use cases. Now let us talk about the availability aspects of NetScaler Insight.

 

NetScaler Insight 1.0 is available for beta now!!

 

We have launched the beta release of NetScaler Insight 1.0 and you can download the VM image with all supported documentation.

 

In case of any query please feel free to reach out to myself (Abhilash.verma@citrix.com) and Neha (neha.harit2@citrix.com).