Configure monitoring agent on service mesh

Service meshes like Consul let you monitor the health and performance of services in your distributed system. Consul gives you visibility into service-to-service communication and access to advanced monitoring and observability capabilities.

Consul integrates with monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana, which let you collect and analyze metrics and logs from your mesh services. Once you enable proxy metrics and access logs in Consul, you do not need to configure or instrument your services. Consul configures the sidecar Envoy proxies to automatically send metrics and logs data directly to your centralized monitoring platform.

A common challenge with application monitoring across distributed systems is a lack of standardized metric naming conventions as applications evolve. This makes it difficult to consistently template dashboards and alters. Consul standardizes metric names and values based on the telemetry data emitted from its Envoy proxies.

Consul solves this by providing built-in instrumentation that captures standardized observability data from the service mesh layer. This makes it easier to create standardized monitoring dashboards, and let you monitor services on the mesh without manually instrumenting them.

HashiCorp resources:

• The Consul proxy metrics tutorial guides you through how to configure Consul Envoy proxies to help you monitor service health and performance on the mesh.
• The Consul proxy access logs tutorial guides you through how to configure Consul Envoy proxies to help you debug service mesh events and errors.

Next steps

In this section of Setup monitoring agents, you learned how to configure and deploy monitoring agents on service mesh. Configure monitoring agent on service mesh is part of the Define and automate processes pillar.