Citrix Systems CITRIX NETSCALER 9.3 How AppFlow Works Configuring the AppFlow Feature, Topics

Chapter 7

AppFlow

Topics:

•How AppFlow Works

•Configuring the AppFlow Feature

The Citrix® NetScaler® 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. AppFlow transmits the information by using the Internet Protocol Flow Information eXport (IPFIX) format, which is an open Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard defined in RFC 5101. IPFIX (the standardized version of Cisco's NetFlow) is widely used to monitor network flow information. AppFlow defines new Information Elements to represent application-level information.

Using UDP as the transport protocol, AppFlow transmits the collected data, called flow records, to one or more IPv4 collectors. The collectors aggregate the flow records and generate real-time or historical reports.

AppFlow provides visibility at the transaction level for HTTP, SSL, TCP, and SSL_TCP flows. You can sample and filter the flow types that you want to monitor.

AppFlow use actions and policies to send records for a selected flow to specific set of collectors. An AppFlow action specifies which set of collectors will receive the AppFlow records. Policies, which are based on Advanced expressions can be configured to select flows for which flow records will be sent to the collectors specified by the associated AppFlow action.

To limit the types of flows, you can enable AppFlow for a virtual server. AppFlow can also provide statistics for the virtual server.

You can also enable AppFlow for a specific service, representing an application server, and monitor the traffic to that application server.

Note: This feature is supported only on NetScaler nCore builds.

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