HashiCorp Consul monitoring integration

The HashiCorp Consul on-host integration collects and sends inventory and metrics from your Consul environment to New Relic, where you can see the health of your Consul datacenter environment. We collect data on both the datacenter and agent/node levels.

Read on to install the integration, and to see what data we collect.

Compatibility and requirements

Our integration is compatible with HashiCorp Consul 1.0 or newer.

Before installing the integration, make sure that you meet the following requirements:

• If Consul is not running on Kubernetes or Amazon ECS, you must install the infrastructure agent on a host running Consul. Otherwise:
  • If running on Kubernetes, see these requirements.
  • If running on ECS, see these requirements.
• If using ACL, the credentials for the Consul integration must have the following policies: agent:read, node:read, and service:read.

Quick start

Instrument your Consul environment quickly and send your telemetry data with guided install. Our guided install creates a customized CLI command for your environment that downloads and installs the New Relic CLI and the infrastructure agent.

Ready to get started? Click one of these button to try it out.

Our guided install uses the infrastructure agent to set up the HashiCorp Consul integration. Not only that, it discovers other applications and log sources running in your environment and then recommends which ones you should instrument.

The guided install works with most setups. But if it doesn't suit your needs, you can find other methods below to get started monitoring your Consul environment.

Install and activate

To install the HashiCorp Consul integration, follow the instructions for your environment:

Additional notes:

• Advanced: Integrations are also available in tarball format to allow for install outside of a package manager.
• On-host integrations do not automatically update. For best results, regularly update the integration package and the infrastructure agent.

Configure the integration

An integration's YAML-format configuration is where you can place required login credentials and configure how data is collected. Which options you change depend on your setup and preference.

There are several ways to configure the integration, depending on how it was installed:

• If enabled via Kubernetes: see Monitor services running on Kubernetes.
• If enabled via Amazon ECS: see Monitor services running on ECS.
• If installed on-host: edit the config in the integration's YAML config file, consul-config.yml.

Config options are below. For an example configuration, see Example config file.

Commands

The configuration accepts one command:

• all_data: collects both inventory and metrics for the HashiCorp Consul environment.

Arguments

The configuration command accepts the following arguments:

• hostname: The hostname or IP of a Consul node within the cluster. Defaults: localhost. Required.
• port: Port to connect to node on. Default: 8500. Required.
• fan_out: Whether to connect to other Consul agents to collect node data from them. Default: true.
• token: ACL Token if token authentication is enabled.
• enable_ssl: Whether or not to connect using SSL. Default: false.
• trust_server_certificate: If set to true, server certificate is not verified for SSL. If set to false, certificate will be verified against supplied CA Bundles. Default: false.
• ca_bundle_file: Alternative Certificate Authority bundle file, required if enable_ssl is set to true and trust_server_certificate is set to false.
• ca_bundle_dir: Alternative Certificate Authority bundle directory, required if enable_ssl is set to true and trust_server_certificate is set to false.

Example configuration

Example consul-config.yml file configuration:

integration_name: com.newrelic.consul

instances:
  - name: consul-prod
    command: all_data
    arguments:
      hostname: consul-dev-0.consul.localnet
      token: my_token
    labels:
      env: production
      role: consul

For more about the general structure of on-host integration configuration, see Configuration.

Find and use data

Data from this service is reported to an integration dashboard.

Metrics are attached to these event types:

• ConsulDatacenterSample
• ConsulAgentSample

You can query this data for troubleshooting purposes or to create custom charts and dashboards.

For more on how to find and use your data, see Understand integration data.

Metric data

The HashiCorp Consul integration collects the following metric data attributes.

Consul datacenter sample metrics

These attributes are attached to the ConsulDatacenterSample event type:

Consul agent sample metrics

These attributes are attached to the ConsulAgentSample event type:

Inventory data

The HashiCorp Consul integration captures the configuration parameters and current settings of the Consul Agent nodes. It collects the results of the /v1/agent/self REST API endpoint. It pulls the Config and DebugConfig sections from that response.

The data is available on the Inventory page, under the config/consul source. For more about inventory data, see Understand integration data.

Check the source code

This integration is open source software. That means you can browse its source code and send improvements, or create your own fork and build it.