Table of Contents
Overview
Since NetScaler Firmware 14.1 build 56.x the Reporting-Tool is deprecated. With 13.1 you can still use it. What does that mean and what’s the Reporting Tool for? Do you recognize the GUI-design of the heading image? It was Firmware 10.5, good old times.
First of all, since deprecation, the “Reporting” Tab in GUI is removed, it’s not a bug that you aren’t able to find it, anymore:
With Reporting, you were able to check statistics regarding Network Throughput, Resource Usage (Packet CPU, Crypto, Memory,…) and also statistics regarding ICA / SSL and AAA connections. All with a longterm fallback for months. Was great to check if there were any changes in Firmware, eg “Since Update XXX the Memory allocation is way higher than before.”
NetScaler Console Network Reporting
So now its gone, whats next? It’s no surprise that you should configure NetScaler Console’s Network Reporting feature as replacement. As you need a NetScaler Console or use NetScaler Console Service for LAS-activation, it makes sense to ship more diagnostics to Console, away from NetScaler itself.
A quick overview of the feature set of Network Reporting Dashboards:
You can start to create your own Dashboards with different Types, Global means the complete NetScaler Instance / HA-Pair. If you would like to have data only for specific vServers, you have to choose:
I’ve created some common Reports, which I’ve used before on NetScaler Reporting, too:
Polling and Data Pruning
Depending on your settings how short the polling-interval is and how many of the Dashboards you’ve created, you should also check the Pruning settings, matching your storage usage of the NetScaler Console VM.
Thresholds and Notifications
You can create individual Thresholds for any of your Reports and enable Notifications. Here’s an example of high / critical Packet CPU usage:
Summary
As NSC / NSC-Service is a must have for Licensing, it’s the correct move to switch such metric-data to a centralized appliance, rather than staying locally on every instance itself.