Observability with Consul

Gain insight into service health and performance metrics with built-in visualization directly in the Consul UI or by exporting metrics to a third-party solution.

Challenge

Observability of decentralized applications

Many modern applications have migrated towards decentralized architectures as opposed to traditional monolithic architectures. This is especially true with microservices. Since applications are composed of many interdependent services, there's a need to have a topological view of the services and their dependencies. Furthermore, there is a desire to have insight into health and performance metrics for the different services.

Solution

Centralized visualization

Consul collects metrics and provides a built-in UI to help visualize topology between interdependent services. This can be helpful when configuring new services or troubleshooting existing connections. Consul service mesh on Kubernetes provides a deep integration with Prometheus, including a starter experience for installing Prometheus in demo or dev environments. Consul can also expose metrics from the Envoy proxies onto Prometheus and Granfana to provide visualization for layer 7 application traffic. Deeper observability is also available with third-party tools like DataDog.