Citrix NetScaler integration with SCOM 2012 R2

I leave you a piece of Oscar Mas's document, We hope you are interested! One of the most important things in any system we implement, is the monitoring of said system. Microsoft and Citrix, give us the possibility to monitor our systems, using the System Center Operations Manager tool, better known as SCOM. For those of us who are old in the trade, we will know this tool as MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager).

The logical scheme would be as follows.

We start from the base that our Citrix NetScaler is already installed and configured and also our Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 (SCOM 2012 R2). In this post, I will not explain how to implement the two systems, what we'll do is set up our SCOM 2012 R2, to be able to monitor a NetScaler.

Being a very long post, I've divided it into sections, to make it more enjoyable.

Preparing our system
Installing the Management Pack
Rule Enabled
Creation of the Management Pack
Creating Rules
NetScaler Configuration
Account creation
Discovering our Netscaler

Preparing our system

One of the first steps to be taken, is to check that the reverse resolution of our servers is correct, since System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 (SCOM 2012 R2) It uses the reverse to show us the name that it will teach us in the different configurations.

We will easily do this by nslookup against the NetScaler and SCOM IP addresses.

On our System Center Operations Manager server 2012 R2 (SCOM 2012 R2), we will add the SNMP Feature, with which we will accept the SNMP frames that we will later configure in our NetScaler.

In the SNMP service, We will let you know that we accept packages from any host. Being a lab, We accept any SNMP package, but in production it is advisable to only give access to the equipment that needs it from our network, which we are going to monitor.

Once configured, restart the "SNMP Service" services, for changes to be applied to our system. Make sure that the firewall of our System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 (SCOM 2012 R2) allows SNMP traffic to enter.

Installing the Management Pack

We have to download the Citrix NetScaler Operation Manager Pack from the official Citrix website (Login required).

The NetScaler Operation Manager Pack, provides us with the monitors and rules to be able to apply them to our NetScaler system.

We will install the "NetScaler Management Pack for NetScaler 10.5" package on the System Center Operations Manager server 2012 R2 (SCOM 2012 R2) And we can see what has left us the templates with MP extension in the path: "C:\Program FilesCitrixNetScalerSystemCentermp". From the "Administration" option we will import the Management Pack, which we have installed as follows.

Click on “Install”,

We will verify that it has been successfully imported into our System Center Operations Manager system 2012 R2 (SCOM 2012 R2) from the Management Pack option in the Administration menu.

Under the monitoring option we will be able to see that a new tree has been created for us and we will see that within this tree called "Device States", There are two sub-sections:

ActiveDevices: In this section we will find the Standalone systems and the primary devices of our systems in High Availability (HAS)
AllDevices: We will find all the systems, Standalone with the primary and secondary lyspositives of our High Availability system (HAS)

Rule Enabled

Default the rules that we have installed in our System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 (SCOM 2012 R2) They come disabled.

What we will do is enable them from the "Authoring" option and from there we will go to "Rules" and then to “Change Scope”.

We will instruct you to search only for the word "citrix" and select all the targets.

Creation of the Management Pack

We will create a Management Pack.

Indicating name and version.

Creating Rules

In this section, what we will do is configure the rules that we want our System Center Operations Manager to monitor 2012 R2 (SCOM 2012 R2).

I have taken the rule in which it tells us that the services are working correctly (Server Current Services UP), but there are many more and many of them very interesting.

We'll tell you to overwrite the value and add it to our Management Pack.

NetScaler Configuration

In this section, we will configure our NetScaler so that the System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 (SCOM 2012 R2) can collect information from our NetScaler.

We will create the community: NetScaler,

And we'll point you to our System Center Operations Manager server 2012 R2 (SCOM 2012 R2).

Account creation

We will create the account that will be used to authenticate with our NetScaler.

Since “Administration” > “Accounts” > “Create Run As Account…”

We indicate a descriptive name and the type of account,

We will provide you with the login credentials to our NetScaler. Remember that the default username and password are nsroot.

Discovering our NetScaler

In this section we will discover our NetScaler.

In the discovery wizard, we'll tell you that the device uses SNMP (Network Devices).

We will create the account, to tell you the name of the community.

We give you a descriptive name,

We indicate the SNMP community defined above,

And we finish the wizard by adding our NetScaler appliances, adding your IP.

Once the Wizard is finished, will make us discover our NetScaler, from which we will be able to observe various data from our NetScaler as shown in the screenshot. Look at the detail, that has discovered that our NetScaler is configured in HA and our secondary NetScaler has the IP: 192.168.250.113.