HashiCorp Consul is a service networking solution that enables teams to manage secure network connectivity between services, and across on-prem and multi-cloud environments and runtimes. Consul offers service discovery, service mesh, traffic management, and automated updates to network infrastructure devices.
The Consul agent’s metrics endpoint supports Prometheus-formatted metrics. As with other services which expose such an endpoint, use an OpenTelemetry Collector to scrape this endpoint and get these metrics into Honeycomb.
Refer to the Consul documentation for a list of Key Metrics, as well as a full Metrics Reference.
Prometheus metrics are not enabled by default; therefore the prometheus_retention_time to a non-zero value enables them.
We recommend setting this value to at least twice the scrape interval of your Collector.
The HashiCorp documentation also suggests setting disable_hostname to avoid having hostname-prefixed metrics.
A suggested agent configuration should be created as /etc/consul.d/metrics.hcl on each Consul agent as follows:
telemetry {
disable_hostname = true
prometheus_retention_time = "72h"
}
Scraping the Consul agent’s Prometheus metrics endpoint requires configuring a Collector with a pipeline that starts with a prometheus receiver and ends with an OTLP exporter. Depending on your chosen method of Consul deployment, the resource detection processor may be helpful to further enrich the OTLP Metrics being sent to Honeycomb.
An example Collector configuration using the system resource detector processor follows:
receivers:
prometheus:
config:
scrape_configs:
- job_name: consul-metrics
scrape_interval: 60s
metrics_path: /v1/agent/metrics
static_configs:
- targets:
- localhost:8500
processors:
batch:
resourcedetection/os:
detectors:
- system
system:
hostname_sources:
- os
exporters:
otlp/metrics:
endpoint: api.honeycomb.io:443
headers:
"x-honeycomb-team": "YOUR_API_KEY"
"x-honeycomb-dataset": "consul-metrics"
service:
pipelines:
metrics:
receivers:
- prometheus
processors:
- resourcedetection/os
- batch
exporters:
- otlp/metrics