Consul
Consul, developed by HashiCorp, is a comprehensive service networking solution that provides service discovery, configuration, and segmentation functionalities. It enables organizations to securely and efficiently connect and configure services across any runtime platform and public or private cloud. Consul's key feature, service discovery, allows services to register themselves and discover other services via a centralized registry, automating network configurations and reducing manual intervention.
Consul's dynamic infrastructure is designed to support the modern, microservices-driven architecture, where it plays a crucial role in maintaining a real-time, up-to-date directory of all the services running in the infrastructure. This ensures smooth communication and operational efficiency among microservices by providing each service with the necessary information to locate and interact with other services in the network.
Furthermore, Consul offers robust health checking mechanisms, ensuring only healthy instances are used for traffic, thereby increasing the reliability of the overall system. It also supports secure service-to-service communication with built-in service mesh capabilities, enabling fine-grained control over service interactions with enforceable policies and encrypted communications. This multifaceted approach makes Consul an indispensable tool for developers and operators looking to implement a secure, high-availability service architecture in dynamic and distributed environments.
Integrating Consul with groundcover
To start accessing granular insights, just follow these 2 super easy steps:
Step 1: Enable Custom Metrics
Follow our quick guide on how to enable scraping custom metrics on groundcover.
Step 2: Import dashboard using Grafana ID
In the groundcover platform, go to Dashboards -> New -> Import.
In the box titled "Import via grafana.com", enter one of the following dashboard IDs, then click "Load".
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Consul Monitoring
Get performance metrics from Consul metrics prometheus endpoint /agent/metrics?format=prometheus. Tested with Consul 1.4.4, Prometheus 2.10.0 and Grafana 6.2.4. Although can potentially work with other versions.
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Consul Server Monitoring
Maintained by the Consul team at HashiCorp. Displays critical health metrics about Consul servers, which are key to understanding Consul servers' behavior and stability in production. Also offers pre-built sections and panels for understanding usage of Consul by feature such as: KVs, DNS, the Catalog, and ACLs.
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Consul Mesh Metrics
Rendering metrics issued by envoy-sidecar when you’re using service mesh with consul connect. It provides statistics about listeners, clusters and grpc (if available)
Note: The dashboards above are the 5 most downloaded Consul dashboards on Grafana's website, and are listed by number of downloads. More dashboards are available on their website and the steps to add them is the same. Visit this page for the full list of Consul dashboards.
That's it!
You can now see the imported dashboard in your list of Dashboards and start using it immediately.
You can repeat this action to load as many of these dashboards as you like.
If you import more than one of these dashboards, you may find it useful to create a Consul Dashboards Folder in groundcover.
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