For so many Citrix customers, Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) service simplifies the way they manage and get the best out of their application delivery infrastructure. Whether they’re using the cloud-delivered Citrix ADM service to centrally manage Citrix ADC upgrades and configurations or the advanced prediction and security capabilities driven by machine learning, one thing is certain — they’re more agile than ever before while saving time and cutting costs significantly.
But Citrix customers aren’t the only ones enjoying Citrix ADM’s breadth of benefits. Citrix’s own IT team has fully adopted Citrix ADM service for management, monitoring, and automation of our application delivery infrastructure and to gain deep visibility into applications delivered by Citrix ADC. The results have brought unprecedented efficiency to our own IT, with nearly 10,000 hours of time savings across the team in a single year.
Management in Minutes
Citrix IT has hundreds of instances of Citrix ADC deployed to run over 1,000 applications for an average of about 10,000 users each. With this large-scale deployment, Citrix ADC upgrades were a massive commitment and required nearly two weeks of manual work each quarter before we deployed Citrix ADM service. Dario Lemes, a Principal IT Systems Engineer at Citrix, said that when it was time for an infrastructure upgrade, it would “involve several engineers assigned to the project and several hours for those engineers to work through the task.”
But with Citrix ADM service, Dario said, “we can upgrade our entire infrastructure within two hours, tops, if required. Not only is it a tremendous value for freeing up our time and resources — all we have to do is select the desired build we want to upgrade our appliances to, and the rest is fully automated.”
The same goes for the installation and renewal of SSL certificates, a formerly manual process that took up to an hour per application. With more than 1,000 applications in use, the process was time-consuming. The Citrix ADM service SSL dashboard provides an intuitive, single-pane view of all application certificates and has enabled Citrix IT to renew SSL certificates in a matter of minutes. In addition to saving time, it’s much easier to ensure constant compliance with the enterprise SSL security posture at all times.
Citrix IT takes advantage of a number of other Citrix ADM service features to make infrastructure management easier. Pushing consistent configuration profiles to any or all Citrix ADC instances is straightforward, and weekly configuration audits automatically notify IT if anything has changed and requires their attention. Citrix ADC instances are backed up automatically and manually restored if needed.
Citrix IT leverages Citrix ADM service StyleBooks to provide a self-service portal to application owners for deploying and managing enterprise applications. This provides application owners with a more straightforward experience while managing their apps, because Citrix ADM service eliminates the need for manual configuration of Citrix ADC by the networking or IT teams. Application deployment with Citrix ADM has effectively gone from a two-day chore to a quick task that takes a few minutes. This automation also helps our IT team avoid any errors that might occur during application configuration.
Actionable Insights at a Glance
In addition to drastically cutting the time and resource commitment of Citrix ADC fleet management, Citrix ADM service has given the Citrix IT team a suite of new monitoring and analytics capabilities to ensure the health and performance of all ADC instances and applications hosted on them. These capabilities are also critical to maintaining a consistent security posture across all ADCs and applications at all times and bring the major benefits of increased agility and the ability to respond faster to issues.
Monitoring the health of the entire ADC infrastructure is handled entirely through the Infrastructure Analytics feature in Citrix ADM. This routine check, which used to demand a few hours of attention, now takes a matter of minutes. Citrix ADM service provides an intuitive map of the infrastructure and, as Dario said, “we can easily spot the ADCs that need our attention and take care of them. This helps us to be proactive rather than reactive and act to resolve issues before they happen.”
Being able to apply a consistent configuration profile quickly and easily across ADC instances virtually eliminates the risk of human error (including just making an unfortunate typo). Consistent naming conventions further enable automation opportunities, remove ambiguity, and generally improve the overall security posture. As cyberattacks become increasingly complex and disguised in their nature, Citrix ADM service’s machine learning capabilities are more important than ever in discerning malicious behavior that human observers might not notice. Citrix ADM service helps Citrix IT detect and protect against a wide variety of these attacks, including account takeovers, excessive client connections, website scraping, and more.
When performance or security concerns arise, Citrix IT previously needed up to an hour to diagnose each issue to properly resolve them. With multiple issues across more than 1,000 applications, Citrix IT was literally committing thousands of hours a year to assessing and resolving application issues.
“With the Application Dashboard, we get an intuitive look at all of our applications in one place,” Dario said. “We can look at each individual app and see details on every issue that occurred over a period of time. This way, we can tell application owners exactly what the issues are. This cuts our troubleshooting time by over 80 percent.”
Because Citrix ADM service is cloud-delivered, Citrix IT can view analytics and manage the infrastructure anytime, anywhere, without any regular deployment management or updates necessary.
Agility Means Everything
The cloud-delivered Citrix ADM service continues to deliver unprecedented operational efficiency to Citrix IT, a testament to our mission to bring holistic visibility and straightforward management to even the most complex application delivery infrastructures. The numbers don’t lie, after all — the Citrix IT team has saved close to 10,000 hours with Citrix ADM.
