Revolutionizing VPN Access Control with Prometheus, Rancher, Cisco AnyConnect, and Microsoft Azure: An Integrated Monitoring and Deployment Framework

Introduction¶

In modern organizations, secure VPN access is paramount. At ShitOps, we've encountered the challenge of ensuring real-time monitoring, dynamic scaling, and seamless deployment of Cisco AnyConnect VPN clients across our distributed workforce. The complexity of today's infrastructure demands an equally sophisticated solution that provides granular telemetry, proactive alerting, and zero downtime during updates.

This post details our cutting-edge solution leveraging Prometheus for metrics collection, Rancher for container orchestration, Microsoft Azure for cloud resource management, and Cisco AnyConnect as our VPN client of choice.

Problem Statement¶

Our engineers required a robust way to deploy Cisco AnyConnect clients across multiple endpoints with real-time usage and performance metrics collection, along with an automatic scaling mechanism to handle fluctuating loads without manual intervention. Previous approaches lacked cohesive monitoring integration and presented deployment bottlenecks.

Proposed Architecture¶

We proposed an integrated deployment and monitoring architecture as follows:

• Use Rancher for Kubernetes cluster management to orchestrate containerized instances of Cisco AnyConnect agents.

• Leverage Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for cloud-native scalability.

• Use Prometheus to scrape detailed VPN session metrics from each Cisco AnyConnect container.

• Implement custom exporters to translate Cisco AnyConnect status into Prometheus metrics.

• Configure alert managers to respond to anomalies automatically.

Deployment Workflow¶

Step 1: Containerizing Cisco AnyConnect¶

We created a Docker image encapsulating the Cisco AnyConnect software along with custom telemetry exporters that expose detailed session metrics over HTTP endpoints compatible with Prometheus.

Step 2: Rancher Orchestration¶

Deploying our containerized AnyConnect agents on a Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster provides:

• Auto-scaling based on CPU and memory thresholds

• Rolling updates to maintain availability

• Network policies for secure inter-pod communication

Step 3: Metric Collection and Alerting¶

Prometheus scrapes the metrics endpoints at a 15-second interval, storing time-series data for:

• Active VPN session count

• Authentication latency

• Packet loss percentages

• Reconnection attempts

Configured alert rules trigger pre-defined actions such as scaling or notifications.

Step 4: Azure Integration¶

Azure Monitor integrates Kubernetes metrics and logs with Prometheus data, providing a unified dashboard. Azure Functions automate remediation based on alert triggers.

Implementation Diagram¶

Benefits¶

• Scalability: Auto-scaling clusters easily absorb VPN load spikes.

• Visibility: Granular metrics improve troubleshooting and capacity planning.

• Automation: Alert-driven scaling and remediation reduce manual overhead.

• Security: Network policies enforced at the orchestration layer enhance protection.

Conclusion¶

By merging the powerful monitoring capabilities of Prometheus, the seamless orchestration of Rancher, the robustness of Microsoft Azure cloud frameworks, and the reliability of Cisco AnyConnect VPN, ShitOps has built a futuristic infrastructure that not only handles today’s challenges but also future-proofs our VPN access control and observability.

Our ongoing efforts focus on further enhancing AI-driven anomaly detection and predictive scaling to push the boundaries of what enterprise VPN infrastructure can achieve.

Thank you for exploring this innovative architecture with us — we look forward to sharing more pioneering solutions in upcoming posts!