In today’s fast-paced digital world, Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) play a critical role in ensuring that applications are delivered securely, reliably, and efficiently. Managing these ADCs, especially in large-scale and hybrid environments, can become a complex and resource-intensive task. Radware’s Cyber Controller is a centralized management tool that allows you to monitor and control your Alteon ADCs deployment from a single interface. It provides streamlined and frictionless operation of the entire ADC lifecycle, wherever they are located.
This blog explores the key benefits of using Cyber Controller as centralized management for Alteon and how it improves Alteon administration.
1. Unified Configuration and Monitoring
Cyber Controller provides a single pane of glass to manage all Alteons in any location, whether on-premises, private, or public cloud, including hybrid environments. This unified approach simplifies the configuration and monitoring processes, ensuring consistency and reducing the risk of misconfigurations. With Cyber Controller administrators can:
- Manage Configurations: Implement and update configurations across all Alteon instances from one central location, ensuring uniform policies and settings. Administrators can navigate from one Alteon to another without the need to authenticate with each instance separately. Additionally, it eliminates conflicts by ensuring that only one administrator can alter the configuration at a given time.
- Perform Maintenance Tasks: Schedule configuration backups, device reboots, version management, and updates of ERT Active Attacker Feed from a single location.
2. Dashboards and Analytics
Cyber Controller provides sophisticated analytics with insights into Alteon status and performance. You can gain comprehensive visibility into your application health and performance and quickly identify the root cause of any issues. Cyber Controller intuitive analytics offer a detailed breakdown of the various application chain components, allowing fast and efficient root-cause analysis. Cyber Controller ADC Analytics Provides:
- Application and System Status and Performance: A unified view of all Alteons and applications, providing real-time updates on the status of each component and making issue observation effortless. It enables monitoring of system and application performance metrics over up to three months, allowing the identification of trends and potential problems before they escalate. Additionally, ADC Analytics notifies you when an SLA breach occurs, enabling you to proactively address issues before the end users experience the problems. Furthermore, Cyber Controller allows you to generate performance reports either immediately or on a scheduled basis, providing valuable insights for maintaining optimal performance and planning future improvements.
Fast and Intuitive Root Cause Analysis: The transaction-based dashboard, with its powerful filtering mechanism, quickly identifies problematic transactions such as a missing page or SSL handshake failure. It allows pinpointing the root cause of issues quickly. Understanding end-to-end response time is essential for identifying the source of SLA-related issues.
To learn more about ADC Analytic in Cyber Controller see Using Radware ADC Analytics for Application Awareness and Simplified Troubleshooting
3. GEL Local License Server (LLS)
Radware's Global Elastic License (GEL) simplifies license management by providing a single capacity-based license with all the capabilities and add-on services that your ADC requires. This license can be utilized across different environments, whether on-premises, private cloud, or public cloud. Organizations can leverage GEL to meet their ADC needs. Consolidating ADC licensing under the global elastic license, streamlining administrative tasks, reducing complexity, and enhancing operational efficiency. GEL Local License Server (LLS) as part of the Cyber Controller provides:
- Manage Global Capacity: Using the GEL Dashboard, you can manage global license capacity from a central location, providing visibility into license usage across the organization.
- Simplified License Operation: From the GEL Dashboard, you can allocate and update the capacity of an Alteon based on its specific needs with a click of a button. Release the capacity back to the pool when the instance is no longer required, ensuring no resources are wasted.
To learn more about ADC Analytic in Cyber Controller, see 5 Benefits of Using Global Elastic License (GEL)
4. Alteon Automation Engine
The Alteon Automation Engine facilitates the efficient execution of complex operations, automates frequently recurring tasks, and minimizes manual errors and overhead associated with administrative tasks. It empowers you to utilize widely recognized and established languages such as Ansible and Python to execute configuration templates or operation workflows based on a shared repository in Cyber Controller. Alteon Automation Engine provides:
- Templates: Predefined sets of configuration settings that you can apply to multiple instances. Templates help you follow best practices, ensure compliance across the organization, and enforce security settings. With Alteon Automation Ansible-based templates, you can perform tasks such as onboarding Alteon instances or deploying new applications in a standardized way, saving time and effort in managing complex environments.
Workflow: Python based Scripts that automate more complex tasks that operators need to do often or regularly for service maintenance. For instance, you can automate the validation of SSL certificates across multiple devices. The task will run automatically based on the defined schedule and send you a report of its status. You can also automate the upgrade of Alteon HA pair or gracefully shutdown a server for maintenance. Workflows can save you more than 95% of the time that you would normally spend on maintenance tasks. Allowing to script general tasks with Python provides great flexibility given the ubiquity of this scripting technology.
To learn more about Alteon Automation, see 5 Benefits of Automation of the Application Delivery Lifecycle
5. Cluster Manager and Auto-Scaling
As the internet continues to grow and evolve, the demand for high-performance and reliable ADCs increases. However, high availability deployments or active-active ADC clusters may be less efficient when is come to applications whose traffic are very bursty such as emergency services, or media coverage. With bursty applications, you can optimize your ADC installation by using auto scaling clusters that will dynamically respond to load by expanding the cluster thus providing fast response time for the bursty application while not consuming resource once its not being used.
For example, an e-commerce application during peak shopping seasons, such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday, requires auto-scaling capabilities to manage sudden spikes in traffic. By leveraging ADC clusters with auto-scaling, the application can dynamically adjust its resources to ensure optimal performance and a seamless user experience during these high-demand periods.
The Cyber Controller Cluster Management tool carries out the following functions:
- Cluster Provisioning: It provisions the Alteon instances required for the cluster on the VMware cloud.
- Cluster Scale Out/In: It tracks the resource usage (CPU, throughput, etc.) of the cluster members and, based on user-defined thresholds, triggers a scale-out or scale-in event. The Cluster Manager provisions the new instance, synchronizes its configuration to the rest of the cluster, and registers it in Cyber Controller as part of the cluster or decommissions an instance and removes it from Cyber Controller cluster inventory in case of a scale-in event.
To learn more about Alteon Cluster manager, see Alteon Automation Made Easy with Cyber Controller
6. Centralized Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Security and proper access management are crucial for Alteon management. A centralized RBAC system allows administrators to control who has access to what. Cyber Controller supports local users as well as external authentication servers such as LDAP, TACACS+, RADIUS, and more. Cyber Controller RBAC enhances security by:
- Defining Roles and Permissions: Assign specific permissions and scope to users. Each user is assigned a role that defines its permissions as well as a scope that defines the instances that it can access. This ensures that only authorized personnel can make critical changes, while others can only monitor.
- Auditing Access: Keep detailed logs of access and changes made across all Alteons, facilitating easier auditing and compliance reporting.
Conclusion
Radware’s Cyber Controller significantly enhances the management of Alteon ADCs by centralizing and streamlining various administrative tasks. From unified configuration and monitoring to advanced analytics and automation, Cyber Controller ensures efficient, secure, and reliable application delivery. As digital environments continue to evolve, leveraging a robust management tool like Cyber Controller becomes essential for maintaining optimal performance and scalability of your application delivery infrastructure.
Embrace the power of centralized management to drive operational excellence and meet the growing demands of modern web applications.