The Datadog Agent collects many metrics from Consul nodes, including those for:

• Total Consul peers
• Service health - for a given service, how many of its nodes are up, passing, warning, critical?
• Node health - for a given node, how many of its services are up, passing, warning, critical?
• Network coordinates - inter- and intra-datacenter latencies

The Consul Agent can provide further metrics via DogStatsD. These metrics are more related to the internal health of Consul itself, not to services which depend on Consul. There are metrics for:

• Serf events and member flaps
• The Raft protocol
• DNS performance

And many more.

Finally, in addition to metrics, the Datadog Agent also sends a service check for each of Consul's health checks, and an event after each new leader election.

The Datadog Agent's Consul check is included in the Datadog Agent package, so you don't need to install anything else on your Consul nodes.

Edit the consul.d/conf.yaml file, in the conf.d/ folder at the root of your Agent's configuration directory to start collecting your Consul metrics and logs. See the sample consul.d/conf.yaml for all available configuration options.

1. Add this configuration block to your consul.d/conf.yaml file to start gathering your Consul Metrics:

   init_config:
   
   instances:
       # where the Consul HTTP Server Lives
       # use 'https' if Consul is configured for SSL
       - url: http://localhost:8500
         # again, if Consul is talking SSL
         # client_cert_file: '/path/to/client.concatenated.pem'
   
         # submit per-service node status and per-node service status?
         catalog_checks: true
   
         # emit leader election events
         self_leader_check: true
   
         network_latency_checks: true

   See the sample consul.d/conf.yaml for all available configuration options.

2. Restart the Agent to start sending Consul metrics to Datadog.

In the main Consul configuration file, add your dogstatsd_addr nested under the top-level telemetry key:

{
  ...
  "telemetry": {
    "dogstatsd_addr": "127.0.0.1:8125"
  },
  ...
}

Reload the Consul Agent to start sending more Consul metrics to DogStatsD.

Available for Agent >6.0

1. Collecting logs is disabled by default in the Datadog Agent, enable it in datadog.yaml with:

   logs_enabled: true

2. Add this configuration block to your consul.yaml file to start collecting your Consul Logs:

     logs:
         - type: file
           path: /var/log/consul_server.log
           source: consul
           service: myservice

   Change the path and service parameter values and configure them for your environment. See the sample consul.d/conf.yaml for all available configuration options.

3. Restart the Agent.

Learn more about log collection in the log documentation

Run the Agent's status subcommand and look for consul under the Checks section.

Note: If your Consul nodes have debug logging enabled, you'll see the Datadog Agent's regular polling in the Consul log:

    2017/03/27 21:38:12 [DEBUG] http: Request GET /v1/status/leader (59.344us) from=127.0.0.1:53768
    2017/03/27 21:38:12 [DEBUG] http: Request GET /v1/status/peers (62.678us) from=127.0.0.1:53770
    2017/03/27 21:38:12 [DEBUG] http: Request GET /v1/health/state/any (106.725us) from=127.0.0.1:53772
    2017/03/27 21:38:12 [DEBUG] http: Request GET /v1/catalog/services (79.657us) from=127.0.0.1:53774
    2017/03/27 21:38:12 [DEBUG] http: Request GET /v1/health/service/consul (153.917us) from=127.0.0.1:53776
    2017/03/27 21:38:12 [DEBUG] http: Request GET /v1/coordinate/datacenters (71.778us) from=127.0.0.1:53778
    2017/03/27 21:38:12 [DEBUG] http: Request GET /v1/coordinate/nodes (84.95us) from=127.0.0.1:53780

Use netstat to verify that Consul is sending its metrics, too:

$ sudo netstat -nup | grep "127.0.0.1:8125.*ESTABLISHED"
udp        0      0 127.0.0.1:53874         127.0.0.1:8125          ESTABLISHED 23176/consul

See metadata.csv for a list of metrics provided by this integration.

See Consul's Telemetry doc for a description of metrics the Consul Agent sends to DogStatsD.

See Consul's Network Coordinates doc if you're curious about how the network latency metrics are calculated.

consul.new_leader:

The Datadog Agent emits an event when the Consul cluster elects a new leader, tagging it with prev_consul_leader, curr_consul_leader, and consul_datacenter.

consul.check:

The Datadog Agent submits a service check for each of Consul's health checks, tagging each with:

• service:<name>, if Consul reports a ServiceName
• consul_service_id:<id>, if Consul reports a ServiceID

Need help? Contact Datadog support.

• Monitor Consul health and performance with Datadog
• Consul at Datadog