Citrix Systems Network Router NETSCALER 9.3 User Manual

AppFlow

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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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