NS Insight Center 11 was released earlier this month, and with this release Geo Maps is now available for HDX Insight. It was earlier available for Web Insight only. For those of you not familiar with HDX Insight, it is a tool from Citrix that provides end to end visibility from an end user experience perspective for ICA connections that are proxied through the Netscaler. So for instance, if a user reported a slow Citrix session, HDX Insight would help you determine if it is a client side issue (workstation/ISP etc), server issue, application issue, network issue etc. It also provides breakdown on how the bandwidth consumption within the ICA channel (printing/usb/screescrapes). More information on HDX Insight can be found here.
With the 11.x release of NS Insight center, a new feature called Geo Maps has been added to HDX Insight. Geo maps as the name suggests provides a pictoral representation of all the locations from where users are connecting from. By click on any location, you get a summary of the end user experience metrics for that region. This helps you identify performance issues isolated to a specific region quite easily. In addition you can also quickly determine if users are connecting from regions that you dont expect and thereby potentially mitigate a security threat. Geo Maps is an extremely neat addition to HDX Insight and a feature that will greatly benefit customers, specially customers with employees spread across the globe!
Installation and Configuration
My focus in this blog is the configuration of Geo Maps. For basic instructions on how to install Netscaler Insight Center, please refer to this edoc
With regards to Geo Maps. Below are the steps that you need to follow:
Download maxmind “GeoLite City” data base (http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/legacy/geolite/)
Upload database to NS Insight Center (dat file) under Configuration –>Netscaler Insight Center –> Geo Database Files
Also, you need to check “Enable Geo data collection for Web and HDX Insight” for the Device added in the inventory.
Once you’ve followed the steps above, reboot Insight Center and you should be all set. I am yet to test whether Geo Maps shows up under Director as well. Will update the post once I have more information on that. Hope this helps!
One thought on “Geo Maps for HDX Insight (NS Insight Center 11) – Overview and Configuration”