Management plane overview

This topic provides an overview for using HCP Consul's hosted management plane service. The management plane is an interface that centralizes global management operations across all Consul clusters. It provides global visibility and control for both HashiCorp-managed and self-managed Consul clusters, even when you deploy services in multiple cloud environments and regions.

For an explanation of what the management plane is and the benefits it provides, refer to management plane.

Prerequisites

To use the management plane service, your Consul clusters must run Consul v1.14.3 or later. Refer to Upgrade clusters on HCP Consul if the clusters you want to use with the management plane service run an older version of Consul.

Get started with the hosted management plane service

To get started with the HCP Consul management plane, sign in to the HCP portal. Then, select Consul.

HCP displays the management plane's Consul overview as the landing page when you enter an organization's HCP Consul environment. For more information about the contents of this page, as well as the other views and workflows that the management plane service provides, refer to Global network views.

Deploy HashiCorp-managed clusters

When you use HCP Consul to create HashiCorp-managed clusters, they automatically connect to the management plane service. You can create HashiCorp-managed clusters with Terraform, or you can create them manually using the UI workflow. Refer to Create a HashiCorp-managed cluster for more information.

For step-by-step instructions on deploying HashiCorp-managed clusters, refer to the deploy HCP Consul tutorial.

Link self-managed clusters

The management plane also supports self-managed Consul clusters that you install, configure, and manage yourself. Linking self-managed clusters to HCP Consul can help you streamline network operations while maintaining control over your clusters.

You can use HCP Consul to create new self-managed clusters on VMs or Kubernetes that link automatically, or you can link an existing cluster that is already deployed to a cloud or on-prem environment. For more information, refer to Link self-managed clusters with HCP Consul overview.

HashiCups demo app

By default, the code you copy from HCP includes a -demo flag. This flag deploys the HashiCups application so that you can view management plane features in action immediately. If you prefer not to install the sample app, remove the -demo flag before you run the command.

To access the HashiCups ap on Kubernetes, run the following command to make it accessible in a browser at http://localhost:8080:

$ kubectl port-forward service/nginx 8080:80

To remove the demo app after installation, run the following CLI command:

$ helm delete consul-demo -n consul

Global management views

You can use the management plane to view information about both HashiCorp-managed and self-managed clusters, including their current health and registered services. In addition, the management plane provides simplified workflows for creating and managing cluster peering connections, as well as updating the version of HashiCorp-managed clusters.

For more information about the information provided by through the management plane, refer to global network views.

Observability dashboard

For clusters running Consul v1.16 or later, the management plane provides an observability dashboard. This dashboard visualizes server and proxy metrics for both HashiCorp-managed and self-managed clusters to provide insights into Consul’s operations when monitoring or debugging your network’s performance.

The observability dashboard requires the deployment of an automated telemetry collector that gathers server and proxy metrics. Refer to Deploy the Consul telemetry collector for more information about how and when to deploy the collector manually.

For more information about the observability dashboard, including examples of the visualizations it provides and the specific telemetry metrics used to generate the dashboard, refer to Consul observability.