NetScaler Management and Analytics Systems

So earlier today, actually two hours after I was done at work and was walking my dog, Citrix actually released a tech preview of their next-generation Insight and Command Center (Yes! they merged it) into a new product which is now in tech preview which is now called NetScaler Management and Analytics Systems which is essentially a combination of NetScaler Insight Center and Command Center.

NOTE: The NetScaler CPX documentation can be found here –> http://docs.citrix.com/en-us/netscaler-cpx/11-1.html

So from an architectual overview it now looks like something like this.

We can now pull info metrics from each instance using NITRO API, it also uses SNMP as command center does to do more monitoring based upon SNMP traps, it also does AppFlow monitoring. One thing that is missing is that CPX does not have AppFlow support as of now. But we can monitor it using NITRO API from the management console.

Also the Orchestration module now supports Mesos, Nuage and Infoblox in addition to the existing OpenStack support it used to have.

So how does it look like?

Well first of the documentation is missing so still some loose threads that need a bit more digging into, for instance during deployment we have a lot of options besides those that were part of Insight Center

But after adding an appliance to the MAS server it will create some nice charts on on appliance that is added. Based upon CPU, Disk, Memory and status of the LB virtual servers that is part of the appliance.

We also get “instant” overview of the traffic going trough the appliance, and a bit more info in regards to certificate monitoring.

The Insight part is still the same but it contains the latest modules which is Gateway and Security insight –>

And as I mentioned under Orchestration I can add a connection to Apache Mesos, and from here I can provision CPX instances.

Citrix also added a better overview to view different applications

Now a cool thing here is that we can also make our own Application Groups, for instance where we can group based upon a specific tenant or application group consist of different applications.

Then we can view the state of that particular application group

Now lastly, Citrix introduced something called Stylebooks, which is a template based provisioning solution. Where we can add our own stylebooks based upon an XML template