Global network views

This topic describes the global views available through the management plane service. These views provide information about the Consul clusters connected to your HCP organization. Information about both HashiCorp-managed clusters and self-managed clusters are available in global network views.

Consul overview

The unified overview provides an aggregated summary of both HashiCorp-managed and self-managed clusters, including their associated services. It displays overall cluster deployment information, service counts, and service instance health.

The management plane also displays version information for both HashiCorp-managed clusters and self-managed clusters that are linked to the management plane. When a cluster runs a version of Consul that is not the current release, a version badge appears to help you identify clusters to update. The Consul management plane may display the following badges:

• Out of date: The Consul version is not the latest release, but it is still supported because it is within two major releases.
• Out of support: The Consul version is no longer supported because two or more major releases occured since the last update.

To learn more about cluster versions and upgrading, refer to Upgrade clusters on HCP Consul.

Cluster details

You can get detailed information about your HashiCorp-managed and self-managed clusters in HCP Consul and directly access the Consul UI for each cluster from their cluster details.

The cluster details page provides the following information about your self-managed cluster:

• Number of registered services
• Number of service instances
• Number of sidecar proxies
• Number of clients
• Cluster status
• TLS status and expiration date
• Number of active and healthy servers
• Failure tolerance

The service and service instance counts reported on this page include the consul service that is automatically deployed with every Consul server.

You can also find detailed information about individual servers in each cluster. This information includes:

• Server name
• Consul version
• Raft state
• Server ID
• LAN address
• Gossip port
• RPC port
• Time elapsed since last contact with server

This page also provides the URLs and admin tokens used to access your cluster. Refer to Access HashiCorp-managed clusters for more information.

Access privileges to the Consul UI are determined by a user's access role in the HCP platform. For an explanation of how HCP roles map to access privileges, refer to link self-managed clusters. For more information on what access roles are and how to manage them, refer to user permissions.

Services

The unified services overview contains information about services and the associated service instances deployed on your network. You can use it to search for a service name, which returns a list of clusters where the instance is deployed. In addition to listing services and grouping services that share a name, it provides the following global network information about services instances:

• Cluster IDs for the HCP Consul server the service is registered to
• Admin partition name for each service instance
• Namespace for each service instance
• The number of instances connected to Consul Clusters
• The health of a service on the cluster

Service instance health is determined by the response code Consul receives when it attempts to contact the instance. Health states indicate the following response codes:

• Passing: A successful 200-299 code
• Warning: A 429 return code
• Critical: All other response codes

Cluster peering

The cluster peering view lists active cluster peering connections between your clusters. It also provides a global workflow that you can use it create new cluster peering connections, check the status of individual connections between clusters, and confirm the number of services that are available to other clusters.

For each cluster with at least one existing cluster peering connection, the following information is available:

• Name of the cluster with cluster peering connections
• Name of the admin partition with the cluster peering connection
• Number of peers connected to that cluster and admin partition

When you click the name of a cluster, the management plane displays additional details about each cluster peering connection. The following information about individual connections is available:

• Name of each peer with an active connection
• Names of cluster and admin partition for each peer
• Status of each cluster peering connection
• Heartbeat, or the time elapsed since the management plane detected a connection and updated the status
• Number of services the cluster imported from the peer
• Number of services exported from the cluster to the peer

To appear in the list of cluster peering connections, you must create the cluster peering connection using the management plane. Externally created cluster peering connections can interact with clusters that have connections created through the management plane, but they do not appear in the cluster peering view.

For more information about using the management plane to create cluster peering connections, refer to create cluster peering connections in the HCP documentation. For more general information about cluster peering in general, refer to cluster peering overview in the Consul documentation.

Peering connection status

HCP displays one of the following statuses to indicate the current state of the cluster peering connection:

• Connecting
• Active
• Failing
• Deleting

Connecting

The Connecting status appears after you create a cluster peering connection. It indicates that HCP is attempting to exchange peering tokens to establish connectivity between the clusters.

If the status does not change automatically after 5 to 10 minutes, it indicates an issue in the setup process. Check each of the following:

• The cluster names and admin partitions you selected are the intended peers.
• The clusters each belong to a cluster tier that supports network connectivity with the other's region and cloud provider.
• The self-managed clusters were already linked to your HCP account.

After you determine the issue, delete the connection and attempt to establish a new one.

Active

The Active status indicates that the peering tokens were exchanged and the cluster peering connection passed a health check. When a connection's status is Active, you can export services to make them available to peers with active cluster peering connections.

Failing

The Failing status indicates that the cluster peering connection failed its most recent health check and services are not available to peers. This status can appear if you remove a cluster from your network without deleting its cluster peering connection.

Deleting

The Deleting status indicates that the cluster peering connection was deleted from the peer. When you delete a connection from one of the clusters, its peering tokens and imported services are also deleted.

If ending the cluster peering connection was intentional, click More (three dots) and then Delete connection to remove it from the list.

If ending the cluster peering connection was not intentional, delete the connection to remove it from the list. Then, click Create cluster peering connection to restart the process for establishing a cluster peering connection.