Monitoring Consul Service Discovery

HertzBeat integrates with Consul registry to automatically discover service instances and create monitoring tasks for them.

Overview

Consul Service Discovery allows HertzBeat to connect to your Consul server and automatically discover all registered service instances. When a new service instance is registered or an existing instance goes offline, HertzBeat will automatically create or delete corresponding monitoring tasks, achieving automated monitoring in microservice environments.

PreRequisites

Deploy Consul Server

1. Deploy Consul server according to Consul official documentation.
2. Ensure Consul server is accessible from HertzBeat.
3. Verify that you can access Consul UI at http://your-consul-server:8500/ui/
4. Ensure the Consul HTTP API is accessible (default port: 8500)

Configuration parameter

Parameter name	Parameter help description
Target Name	Identify the name of this monitoring. The name needs to be unique.
Consul Host	Consul server IP address or domain name. Note⚠️Without protocol header (eg: https://, http://). Example: consul-server or 192.168.1.100
Consul Port	Port provided by the Consul server. The default is 8500
Collection interval	Interval time of monitor periodic data collection, unit: second, and the minimum interval that can be set is 30 seconds.
Description remarks	For more information about identifying and describing this monitoring, users can note information here.

Usage Steps

1. Create Service Discovery Monitoring

   • In HertzBeat web UI, navigate to Monitoring → New Monitoring
   • Select monitoring type: Consul Service Discovery
   • Fill in the basic configuration parameters

2. Configure Monitoring Template

   • After creating the service discovery monitoring, you need to specify a monitoring template
   • The template defines what type of monitoring to create for discovered service instances
   • For example: If discovered instances are HTTP services, you can select HTTP monitoring template
   • Common template types: Port, HTTP, HTTPS, Ping, etc.

3. Automatic Discovery

   • HertzBeat will periodically query Consul server based on the collection interval
   • Automatically create monitoring tasks for newly registered service instances
   • Automatically delete monitoring tasks for offline service instances

4. View Discovered Instances

   • In the monitoring list, you can see all automatically created sub-monitoring tasks
   • Each sub-monitoring task corresponds to a discovered service instance

Example of usage

Suppose your Consul server is running at 192.168.1.100:8500, and you want to automatically monitor all service instances registered in it.

Configuration example:

• Target Name: Consul-Service-Discovery
• Consul Host: 192.168.1.100
• Consul Port: 8500
• Collection interval: 60 seconds
• Monitoring Template: Select Port monitoring (to detect instance availability)

After configuration:

1. HertzBeat connects to Consul server via HTTP API
2. Retrieves all registered service instances
3. Automatically creates Port monitoring for each instance (e.g., api-service-192.168.1.101:8080)
4. Every 60 seconds, checks for newly registered or offline services and updates monitoring tasks accordingly

Notes

• Network Connectivity: Ensure HertzBeat can access the Consul server address and port (default: 8500)
• Monitoring Templates: Service discovery only discovers service instance addresses, you need to configure appropriate monitoring templates to actually monitor the instances
• Collection Interval: Recommended minimum interval is 60 seconds to avoid excessive requests to Consul server
• ACL Token: If Consul is configured with ACL (Access Control List), you may need to configure the appropriate token
• Service Health: Consul service discovery will discover both healthy and unhealthy instances
• Datacenter: By default, discovers services in the local datacenter. If you need to discover services in a specific datacenter, additional configuration may be required
• Instance Naming: Automatically created monitoring tasks are named in the format: {ServiceName}-{Host}:{Port}

Collection Metric

Metric set: Monitor Target

Metric name	Metric unit	Metric help description
target	none	Discovered service instance target
host	none	Service instance host address
port	none	Service instance port number

Use Cases

• Microservice Architecture: Automatically monitor all microservice instances registered in Consul
• Service Mesh: Monitor services using Consul Connect service mesh
• Multi-Datacenter: Monitor service instances across multiple Consul datacenters
• Dynamic Scaling: Automatically adapt to service instances added/removed due to autoscaling
• Health Check: Combine with Consul's health check mechanism to monitor service health status
• Service Governance: Centrally manage monitoring of all services in the Consul service ecosystem

Integration with Consul Features

• Service Health: Consul service discovery can leverage Consul's health check information
• Service Tags: Service instances discovered from Consul may include tag information
• KV Storage: Can be used in conjunction with Consul KV storage to achieve more flexible service discovery
• Service Mesh: Supports service discovery in Consul Connect service mesh environment