The ability to work from anywhere, at any time, and on any device has become the new norm. This requires solutions and ecosystems that are always available, no matter where or when they are needed, which puts a lot of pressure on network engineers. Additionally, cloud computing and mobile apps have changed the landscape dramatically in recent years. Many enterprises are still trying to figure out how to take advantage of new technologies while still running legacy applications.
By taking a unified approach to network infrastructure, enterprises can support both legacy applications and new technologies at the same time. Organizations get the ability to take advantage of new innovations and the reliability of tried-and-true applications.
If you’re in charge of maintaining a legacy application or set of applications, you’re likely well aware of the difficulties that come along with it. A big issue is that applications often have different versions of the same functionality, making it hard to do a “one-size-fits-all” upgrade.
Another problem is that there are often multiple ways to achieve the same result with the same functionality.
With cloud computing becoming more popular for its ability to be flexible and scalable, enterprises now have the option to deploy and access their applications and data from any location, as well as from multiple devices. Application and device discovery and tracking any configuration changes to said devices are the only ways to notify the user of any changes made to the device configuration.
For these reasons, application delivery controllers (ADCs) are critical components of any network to speed up your application delivery and increase the quality of service.
Automation and management can help you get the most out of your load balancers and ADCs, and deliver a better user experience to your customers. AppViewX ADC+ is a powerful application delivery automation solution that helps businesses manage and orchestrate the delivery of any web and mobile applications.
Discovering the status and configuration of applications is key!
A key aspect of ADC automation and management is how quickly and accurately the state of managed devices and applications and their configurations can be discovered, which in turn provides real-time visibility of applications. Discovering devices and applications along with their configuration is critical in traffic management. This requires the ability to detect configuration changes such as changes in IP addresses, MAC addresses, and web application firewall (WAF) rules. The ability to detect configuration changes allows the network administrator to respond to a configuration change in a timely manner. It also enables the network administrator to proactively prevent problems from occurring.
What we offer…
AppViewX ADC+ is beneficial for keeping track of your ADCs and load balancing devices, such as F5, Nginx, etc., in the network and detecting changes in configurations for these devices and applications. This means you don’t have to worry about whether or not the network configuration is current. AppViewX ADC+ will take care of it for you. This is especially useful if you frequently need to apply software updates or patches.
Precisely, AppViewX ADC+ provides real-time and periodic configuration updates of devices and applications and dynamically updates the user dashboard, thus providing a holistic view of all its managed applications and ensuring that the network configuration is always up to date.
AppViewX uses both FULL CONFIG FETCH and LIGHTWEIGHT CONFIG FETCH to achieve real-time visibility of its managed applications. This helps application operators gain insights into application topology and behavioral changes due to newly provisioned applications.
How does AppViewX ADC+ discover configuration changes of managed applications and devices?
There are a few different approaches that we take when it comes to effectively discovering configuration changes of managed applications and devices:
1. Scheduled Configuration Fetch
AppViewX ADC+ has a Scheduler configured to discover all managed devices during the after-hours (usually at midnight) to effectively utilize resources. Scheduled full config fetch will refresh the complete topology of applications.
Scheduled discovery of devices and applications hosted on those devices does not necessarily provide a real-time state of the network. But, it is used when admins want to limit the usage of network resources.
2. Manual Configuration Fetch
As the name suggests, the Manual Config fetch is used to manually discover changes to the selected devices.
Users will be able to choose the devices that are recently provisioned with new applications. A typical example would be running a manual fetch to discover devices that are out-of-sync with actual configurations due to modifications done to different external sources like ticketing tools. The biggest advantage of the manual configuration fetch is to make devices comply with the latest changes with fewer resources.
3. SysLog-based lightweight Configuration fetch:
Syslog stands for System Logging Protocol and is a standard protocol used to send system log or event messages to a specific server, called a Syslog server. The log information provided by Syslog can be used to quickly determine if a configuration change is the cause of a network problem. This access to real-time visibility of your network helps you improve your network security, prevent unexpected downtime or delays, and resolve known errors faster.
To achieve real-time visibility into the application, AppViewX ADC+ processes and stores logs from multiple sources using the following components:
- Logstash as Syslog Listener: This gathers and processes Syslog data sent over UDP port 514.
- MongoDb/Elasticsearch as storage: Syslog servers need databases to store massive amounts of data for quick access.>
- Filtering and Processing of Syslog messages: Filters are defined in the ‘logstash’ for each vendor to effectively identify the patterns that can be used to trigger the automatic configuration fetch. AppViewX ADC+ identifies the devices based on the create, modify and delete options on applications.The latest configuration retrieved from the device will be compared with the current config available in AppViewX ADC+ to identify new or modified objects.
The AppViewX ADC+ lightweight configuration fetch will correctly identify and update only modified application objects. The device state is updated with the latest changes without performing a full-blown object discovery.
API First
AppViewX ADC+ APIs for full and lightweight config fetch:
Exposing APIs is crucial because they can be used, maintained, and integrated with the system from other platforms in a secure, low coupling, standardized, simple, and interoperable way.
AppViewX ADC+ exposes both its full configuration fetch and lightweight configuration functionality as APIs. These APIs can be integrated to automate and achieve real-time visibility into applications. For example, these APIs can be triggered automatically when new applications are commissioned using workflows.
In a Nutshell,
The Problem:
Manual provisioning and management of complex ADC configurations introduce service delivery delays and errors, increasing OPEX.
Our Solution:
- FULL CONFIG FETCH and LIGHTWEIGHT CONFIG FETCH to achieve real-time visibility of its managed applications
- Integrate with AppViewX ADC+ APIs to automate and achieve real-time visibility into applications
- Reduce infrastructure complexity with zero-touch orchestration
- Over 800+ out-of-the-box automation tasks for common ADC use-cases
- Enable DevSecOps teams to self-service change requests with Service Catalog
- Enable CI/CD processes for application services with DevOps toolchain integration (Jenkins, OpenShift, GIT)
AppViewX Promise:
- Cut down tickets, eliminate errors, and gain insights into application topology and behavioral changes due to newly provisioned applications with self-serviceable automation.
In conclusion, the number of active users, the percentage of those users that are active each day, the number of sessions, and the average session length help admins understand how well their apps are performing. And with applications getting updated by the minute, tracking and monitoring any sort of configuration updates is critical. AppViewX ADC+ provides a complete view of traffic patterns across your entire network and helps you understand any behavioral changes due to newly provisioned applications.
You can easily find out where your application is getting more or less traffic. You can also monitor your website and mobile applications from a single dashboard. You can also monitor your SSL connections, which is critical for managing your sensitive data.
With AppViewX ADC+, you get the best of both worlds: the agility and scalability of the public cloud with the security and control of your own private cloud.
AppViewX ADC+ is the only automation solution to monitor, diagnose and manage the entire lifecycle of an application infrastructure. It also provides a single point of control for all network, security and performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and management.
AppViewX ADC+ is a next-generation ADC/LBaaS automation platform, empowering network, development, security, and app teams with collaborative self-service capabilities to provision, secure, and automate application delivery across their hybrid-cloud/multi-cloud infrastructure.
The result? Faster time to market, higher levels of availability, and stronger security for their services
Achieve the following with AppViewX ADC+:
- LBaaS automation for multiple devices
- Object-level application visibility
- Vulnerability mitigation
- CvE Reporting & Remediation
- Compliance Enforcement
- Self-Servicing by NetDevSecOps
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About the Author
Kotilinga Reddy Bhavanam
Solution Architect
Responsible for Stratgic solutions for implementing techical challenges in ADC product.
