Monitoring and observability

Ensuring the health and performance of Consul and the services it supports is essential. Monitoring and observability provide the insights needed to understand system behavior, enabling proactive management and issue prevention.

Consul emits a wealth of telemetry and logs, offering in-depth visibility into the platform's functionality, and the services running on it. While Consul provides basic tools and UI to view these metrics, it is recommended to leverage feature-rich monitoring and observability tools such as Datadog, AppDynamics CNS, Grafana, and others. HashiCorp has partnered with industry-leading APM vendors to create integrations that make it easy to monitor Consul and its services as part of centralized monitoring and observability tools.

Before starting implementation, building a comprehensive observability strategy is vital to success. This strategy should encompass all teams—platform, DevOps, network, and security teams. It is crucial to select scalable and adaptable solutions that can meet growing demands.

During this standardization phase, HashiCorp advises developing a thorough plan to build and implement an observability strategy. This plan should align with both current objectives and future needs, ensuring readiness for the scaling phase of your maturity journey.

Prerequisites

We recommend that you have completed the following steps before implementing the guidance in this document:

1. A fully functional, production-ready Consul cluster (LTS version 1.15.0 or higher)

2. Services registered and discovered in Consul

3. A fully deployed observability tool, such as Datadog

Build your observability strategy

To successfully implement a comprehensive observability solution, take a holistic approach. This involves thorough evaluation and standardization of the following elements:

• Strategy
• Personas
• Observability pillars
• Alerts and notifications
• Dashboards
• Processes
• Integrations
• Rollout strategy
• Project plan

Strategy

Begin by defining what success looks like. This involves understanding the needs of different stakeholders, selecting appropriate tools and processes, and aligning these elements with your business objectives.

Vision

As with any successful project or initiative, it is important to have an overarching vision for your observability needs. This vision will help guide teams and priorities, ensuring alignment with the overall goals.

Use cases

Engage with all stakeholders to identify and prioritize use cases based on business objectives. Here are a few examples:

• Proactive monitoring: Detect and address issues before they impact end users.

• Troubleshooting: Provide end-to-end visibility, and meaningful insights across applications, services, and infrastructure to aid in troubleshooting.

• Security and compliance: Provide data and insights for security and compliance assessments/audits.

• Capacity planning: Facilitate capacity planning for resources and infrastructure needed to support business growth.

Objectives

Establishing clear objectives that align with the needs and goals of your organization is crucial. Here are some observability objectives to consider:

Proactive monitoring

• Proactive issue detection and resolution
  • Goal: Identify and address issues before they impact users.
  • Key metrics: Error rates, anomaly detection rates, time to detect and resolve issues.
• Comprehensive visibility across systems
  • Goal: Achieve full visibility into the operational state of all components.
  • Key metrics: Coverage of monitored components, completeness of logging and tracing, and data granularity.

Troubleshooting

• Improved incident response and root cause analysis
  • Goal: Streamline incident response and effectively determine the root cause of issues.
  • Key metrics: Incident response time, root cause identification time, post-incident analysis effectiveness.
• Improved system reliability and availability
  • Goal: Minimize system downtime and ensure high availability of services.
  • Key metrics: Uptime percentage, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).

Security and compliance

• Enhanced security monitoring and compliance

  • Goal: Ensure robust security monitoring and compliance with regulatory requirements.

  • Key metrics: Security incident detection rate, compliance audit success rate, security monitoring coverage.

Capacity planning

• Enhanced performance monitoring

  • Goal: Ensure optimal performance of applications and services.

  • Key metrics: Response times, latency, throughput, resource utilization (CPU, memory).

• Scalability and flexibility of monitoring solutions

  • Goal: Ensure observability solutions can scale with business growth and adapt to changing requirements.

  • Key metrics: Scalability benchmarks, ease of integration with new technologies, adaptability to new use cases.

Other goals

Additionally, establish objectives that focus on business expectations, user experience, and organizational improvements. Here are a few such objectives to consider:

• SLAs/SLOs

  • Goal: Establish Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

  • Importance: These are crucial for setting performance baselines, determining alert thresholds, and severities, and establishing appropriate notification methods.

• User experience optimization

  • Goal: Enhance the end-user experience by ensuring seamless and responsive services.

  • Key metrics: User satisfaction scores, application error rates, response times, and service availability from the end user's perspective.

• Improved collaboration across teams

  • Goal: Facilitate better collaboration and knowledge sharing among development, operations, and security teams.

  • Key metrics: Cross-team resolution times, number of collaborative incidents, shared documentation, and practices.

Personas

Observability solutions should be designed to cater to various personas within your organization. Identifying these relevant personas will help determine why they need the solution, how and when they will interact with it, and what information they will gather to address their issues. Here are some common personas to consider:

• Developers
• Platform engineers
  • Infrastructure specialists
  • DevOps engineers
  • Security architects
  • SREs
• Security engineers
• Network operators
• Cloud engineers
• Service owners
• Management

Identifying personas enables you to standardize various aspects of your observability strategy and implementation, such as—

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Develop RBAC standards based on personas to ensure only the intended teams/people have access to create, update, delete, or view dashboards, alerts, and notifications. Not all personas need access to everything.

• Alerts and notifications: Design persona-based alerts and notifications to keep noise low and ensure relevant information reaches the right people.

• Dashboards: Create persona-based dashboards to speed up the troubleshooting process by presenting individuals with data and information relevant to them.

By tailoring your observability strategy to the specific needs and roles of different personas, you can enhance the effectiveness of your monitoring and incident response processes.