Call Home 编辑

Appliances might sometimes fail to perform well because of software or hardware issues. In such cases, Citrix needs to collect data and perform issue resolution before a potential impact can occur at the customer site. By enabling Call Home on your Citrix ADC appliance, you can automate the error notification process. Not only you avoid calling Citrix support, raising a service request, and uploading system data before the support team can troubleshoot the issue, but support can identify and address an issue before it occurs. Call Home periodically monitors the appliance and automatically uploads data to the Citrix technical support server. In addition, the incoming Call Home data provide insights about Citrix ADC usage. Multiple teams within Citrix can use this data to better design, support, and implement Citrix ADC.

By default, Call Home is enabled on all platforms and all flavors of Citrix ADC (MPX, VPX, SDX). By having this feature enabled, you allow Citrix to collect Citrix ADC deployment and telemetry data for better implementation, and support service.

Note

You can also see the Call Home FAQ page for information pertaining to Call Home.

Benefits

Call Home provides the following benefits.

• Monitor hardware and software error conditions. For more information, see Monitor critical error conditions section.
• Notify critical events that impact your network.
• Send performance data and system usage details to Citrix to:
  • Analyze and improve product quality.
  • Provide real-time troubleshooting information for proactive issue identification, and faster issue resolution.

Platform support

Call Home feature is supported on all Citrix ADC platforms and all appliance models (MPX, VPX, and SDX).

• Citrix ADC MPX: All MPX models.
• Citrix ADC VPX: All VPX models, including VPX appliances that obtain their license from external or central licensing pools.
• Citrix ADC SDX: Monitors the disk drive and assigned SSL chips for any errors or failures. The VPX instances, however, do not have access to the Power Supply Unit (PSU) and therefore their status is not monitored. In an SDX platform, you can configure Call Home either directly on an individual instance or through the SVM.

Prerequisites

To use Call Home, the Citrix ADC appliance must have the following:

• Internet connection. Call Home requires an internet connection for the Citrix ADC to connect to the Citrix support server for uploading a data archive.

• URL. Call Home works by exchanging traffic with callhome.citrix.com over SSL/TLS protocol using port 443 for bi-directional traffic.

How Call Home works

The following figure shows a basic workflow of Call Home in a Citrix ADC appliance deployed at a customer site.

The following are the workflow of a Call Home:

1. Set up Internet Connectivity. For Call Home to upload system data, your appliance must have an internet connectivity. If it does not, you can configure a proxy server configuration to provide internet connectivity. For more information, see Configuring Call Home section.

2. Enable Call Home. When upgrading your appliance to the latest software through either Citrix ADC command interface or GUI, Call Home is enabled by default and the system delays the registration process by 24 hours. During this period, you can choose to manually disable the feature, but Citrix recommends you to have it enabled.

Note

If you are upgrading your appliance from an older version that explicitly has Call Home disabled, the system still enables the feature by default and displays a notification message on your first login.

In addition, if you are doing any configuration changes for an internet connectivity, you must disable and enable Call Home. It enables Call Home to register with the Citrix Insight Services (CIS) server without any failure errors.

3. Register the Citrix ADC appliance on the Citrix Support Server. When Call Home registers the appliance with the Citrix Support server, the server checks the database for the validity of the appliance serial number. If the serial number is valid, the server registers the appliance for Call Home service and sends a successful registration response. Otherwise, the server sends back a registration failure message. The basic system information is sent as a separate message. The data includes memory and CPU usage details along with the throughput numbers. The data is sent periodically as part of the heartbeat message every 7 days, by default. However, a value of less than 5 days is not recommended, because frequent uploads are not useful.

4. Monitor critical error conditions. Once registered, Call Home starts monitoring the appliance. The following table lists the conditions Call Home can monitor on the appliance.

5. Upload Call Home data. If any one of the previous critical conditions is identified on the appliance, the Call Home feature automatically notifies the Citrix support. The support archives are uploaded to the Citrix support server. Also, you can configure the CALLHOME-UPLOAD-EVENT SNMP alarm to generate an SNMP alert whenever Call Home upload happens. The SNMP alert notifies the local administrator about the critical event.

Note

Call Home creates the Call Home tar file and uploads it to the Citrix tech support server for only the first occurrence of a particular error condition since the last reboot. If you want the appliance to send alerts each time a particular error condition occurs, configure the corresponding SNMP alarm for the error condition.

6. Create Service Request. Call Home automatically creates a service request for all the critical hardware related events. The events are classified as; power supply failure, SSL card failure, hard disk drive errors, and compact flash errors. For other errors, after you review the System Logs, you can contact the Citrix support team to raise a service request for investigation.

Configuring Call Home

To configure Call Home, verify the internet connectivity on the appliance and ensure a DNS nameserver is configured. If there is no internet connection, configure a proxy server or service. Then, enable Call Home on the appliance and verify the registration status of the appliance with the Citrix support server. Once registered, Call Home can monitor and upload data. In addition, you can configure SNMP alarms to notify the administrator at the customer site.

To configure Call Home, you can use either the Citrix ADC command interface or the GUI to do the following tasks:

• Enable Call Home.
• Configure Call Home for optional proxy server parameters.
• Verify Call Home Registration Status.
• View errors and timestamp details.
• Configure SNMP Alarms.

To configure Call Home by using the Citrix ADC command interface

The Citrix ADC command interface enables you to do the following:

Enabling Call Home

At the command prompt, type:

enable ns feature callhome

Configuring Call Home for optional proxy server parameters

Call Home enables you to configure the optional proxy server for internet connectivity. You can either configure a proxy server with IP address and port or configure a proxy authentication service with one-way or two-way authentication.

To configure optional proxy server with IP address and port

At the command prompt, type:

set callhome –proxyMode ( YES | NO ) [-IPAddress <ip_addr|ipv6_addr|*>] [-port <port |*>]

set callhome –proxyMode YES –IPAddress 10.102.167.33 –port 80
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