Additional observability elements
Alerts and notifications
Alerts and notifications are proactive measures to notify teams of abnormal application behavior. This plays a vital role in observability. They ensure that relevant teams are promptly informed of any issues to prevent potential outages.
When designing alerts and notifications, it is crucial to consider personas and establish consistent standards. Here are key aspects to consider when setting up alerting standards:
Persona: Determine who will receive the notifications based on their role and responsibilities.
RBAC (Role-Based Access Control): Define who can create, update, delete, and manage alert configurations.
Metrics to alert on: Select metrics that are critical to monitor based on your service level agreements (SLAs) and objectives (SLOs).
Thresholds: Set appropriate thresholds that align with performance targets and operational requirements.
Notification channels: Choose effective channels such as Slack, PagerDuty, JIRA, email, etc., to ensure alerts reach the right teams promptly.
Recommendations
Persona based alerts: Customize alerts with relevant titles, thresholds, severity levels, messages, notification channels, and recipients.
Warning thresholds: Set lower thresholds to receive warnings before critical thresholds are breached.
Meaningful notification titles: Use variables when possible to automatically populate alert titles and messages, providing quick insights into the alert trigger.
Monitoring messages: Include detailed incident information and resolution steps, specifying who to contact (e.g., service owner, technical contact) for swift issue resolution.
Noise reduction: Ensure effective alerts by minimizing noise—avoid excessive alerting or notifications.
Flexible alert management: Provide the ability to disable alerts during troubleshooting or maintenance windows as needed.
Refer to Consul's agent telemetry documentation for guidance on key Consul metrics and thresholds that are essential for configuring effective alerts.
Refer to Consul’s “Monitoring service-to-service communication with Envoy” documentation for guidance on key Envoy metrics and alerting thresholds.
References
Dashboards
Managing dynamically changing systems—both services and infrastructure—poses increasing challenges. Observability through visualization and dashboards offers a unified view of your entire IT landscape, enabling effective monitoring, and troubleshooting of applications and infrastructure.
Observability dashboards provide a robust solution by offering—
- Real-time insights into application and infrastructure health
- Centralized visibility across distributed systems
- Correlation of metrics, logs, and traces for rapid issue identification
Recommendations
Create persona-based dashboards tailored to meet the specific needs of various roles within your organization:
SRE: Broad insights into services, infrastructure, and networking.
DevOps: Deeper insights into services, infrastructure, and networking, particularly in response to changes like deployments, feature rollouts, and upgrades.
Developers: Application and service-specific dashboards.
Network team: Detailed metrics related to network performance and issues.
Management: Overall service health and monitor SLA/SLO compliance.
Based on your chosen visualization solution, leverage vendor-provided dashboards for Consul such as Datadog or Grafana, and customize them to meet your specific requirements.
By tailoring dashboards to the distinct needs of different personas, you ensure that each team member has the visibility necessary to perform their roles effectively.
Processes
Having insights into the health of your services is crucial, but timely and appropriate actions are necessary to address any issues. Established processes ensure that individuals and teams know exactly what steps to follow for enabling monitoring, and for efficient issue resolution.
Recommendations
Processes to implement:
Establish baselines: Develop and agree upon baseline metrics with service owners, determining how and when these baselines will be established.
In-take requests: Define how service owners should communicate their monitoring requirements to the platform team for configuration, including metrics, baselines, alerts, notifications, and dashboards.
Incident response: Outline procedures for teams to follow during an incident, including how to inform customers, steps for troubleshooting, communication protocols with other teams, and escalation to management.
By having clear, standardized processes, you ensure a coordinated and efficient response to any issues that may arise, minimizing downtime and maintaining service quality.
Integrations
HashiCorp recommends integrating Consul with third-party APM tools to achieve end-to-end observability of your Consul control plane, Consul data plane, and all registered services. To facilitate this, HashiCorp has partnered with industry-leading APM vendors to provide simple-to-deploy integrations.
Integrating with your existing automation (CI/CD pipelines) is highly recommended.
Recommendations
Consul integrations:
Automation: Use automation tools like Terraform and Ansible to enable/configure monitoring as part of your infrastructure and service deployment process, typically within your CI/CD pipeline. This approach ensures that monitoring is consistent, seamlessly integrated, and operational from the moment your services are deployed.
By leveraging these integrations and automation tools, you can enhance your observability strategy and maintain comprehensive visibility across your systems even when new systems and services come online.
Rollout strategy
To minimize unexpected disruption it is recommended to establish a clear rollout strategy. This approach helps introduce observability-related changes in a controlled manner, reducing the risk of production issues.
Recommendations
Take a phased approach:
Pilot phase:
Begin with a small-scale implementation focused on critical applications and infrastructure.
Evaluate the implementation and refine it based on feedback.
Full rollout:
Gradually expand the observability solution across all systems and teams.
Ensure proper documentation and training are provided.
Continuous monitoring and improvement:
Regularly review the performance of your observability baseline and processes.
Incorporate changes as they become available through the feedback process.
Project plan
To effectively implement your observability strategy, HashiCorp recommends structuring it as a dedicated project. Develop a comprehensive project plan that outlines all tasks, assigns owners, identifies dependencies, and sets clear timelines. This structured approach ensures efficient execution and timely completion of the project.
Example project plan
Project initiation phase
Define project scope, objectives, and success criteria.
Identify stakeholders and establish communication channels.
Assign project manager and core team members.
Planning phase
Conduct a thorough assessment of current observability capabilities.
Define SLAs/SLOs and establish baseline metrics.
Develop detailed requirements for metrics, logs, and tracing implementations.
Identify the observability and log management tools, as well as any auxiliary tools required to meet your objectives
Create a project timeline and milestone schedule.
Implementation phase
Deploy and configure observability tools and platforms (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger).
Integrate monitoring agents and instrumentation into Consul control and data planes.
Set up centralized logging and implement distributed tracing frameworks.
Testing and validation phase
Conduct functional testing to ensure monitoring tools capture expected metrics.
Validate logging configurations and trace propagation across Consul components.
Perform load testing and simulate failure scenarios to verify alerting and response mechanisms.
Deployment and rollout phase
Plan and execute phased deployment of observability enhancements.
Provide training sessions for operations and support teams on new monitoring capabilities.
Monitor system performance post-deployment and address any immediate issues.
Monitoring and optimization phase
Establish ongoing monitoring processes and routines.
Continuously optimize metrics collection, logging practices, and tracing configurations.
Conduct regular reviews to refine SLAs/SLOs based on operational insights.
Documentation and knowledge sharing
Document project outcomes, including configurations, processes, and lessons learned.
Share best practices and operational guidelines with relevant teams.
Update documentation as new tools and practices are adopted.
By following this structured project plan, your organization can effectively implement HashiCorp's recommended observability strategy, ensuring robust monitoring and operational efficiency across your Consul environment.
Conclusion
Consul provides powerful tools for service discovery, health monitoring, and secure communication that integrate seamlessly into a comprehensive observability stack. Tailoring your strategy to include these features will ensure you maintain robust visibility and control over your applications, services, and infrastructure as your company grows.