---
layout: docs
page_title: Monitoring Consul with Telegraf
sidebar_current: docs-guides-monitoring-telegraf
description: >-
  Best practice approaches for monitoring a production Consul cluster with
  Telegraf
---

# Monitoring Consul with Telegraf

Consul makes a range of metrics in various formats available so operators can
measure the health and stability of a cluster, and diagnose or predict potential
issues.

There are number of monitoring tools and options available, but for the purposes
of this guide we are going to use the [telegraf_plugin][] in conjunction with
the StatsD protocol supported by Consul.

You can read the full list of metrics available with Consul in the [telemetry
documentation](/docs/agent/telemetry.html).

In this guide you will:

- Configure Telegraf to collect StatsD and host level metrics
- Configure Consul to send metrics to Telegraf
- See an example of metrics visualization
- Understand important metrics to aggregate and alert on

## Installing Telegraf

The process for installing Telegraf depends on your operating system. We
recommend following the [official Telegraf installation
documentation][telegraf-install].

## Configuring Telegraf

Telegraf acts as a StatsD agent and can collect additional metrics about the
hosts where Consul agents are running. Telegraf itself ships with a wide range
of [input plugins][telegraf-input-plugins] to collect data from lots of sources
for this purpose.

We're going to enable some of the most common input plugins to monitor CPU,
memory, disk I/O, networking, and process status, since these are useful for
debugging Consul cluster issues.

The `telegraf.conf` file starts with global options:

```toml
[agent]
  interval = "10s"
  flush_interval = "10s"
  omit_hostname = false
```

We set the default collection interval to 10 seconds and ask Telegraf to include
a `host` tag in each metric.

As mentioned above, Telegraf also allows you to set additional tags on the
metrics that pass through it. In this case, we are adding tags for the server
role and datacenter. We can then use these tags in Grafana to filter queries
(for example, to create a dashboard showing only servers with the
`consul-server` role, or only servers in the `us-east-1` datacenter).

```toml
[global_tags]
  role = "consul-server"
  datacenter = "us-east-1"
```

Next, we set up a StatsD listener on UDP port 8125, with instructions to
calculate percentile metrics and to parse DogStatsD-compatible tags, when
they're sent:

```toml
[[inputs.statsd]]
  protocol = "udp"
  service_address = ":8125"
  delete_gauges = true
  delete_counters = true
  delete_sets = true
  delete_timings = true
  percentiles = [90]
  metric_separator = "_"
  parse_data_dog_tags = true
  allowed_pending_messages = 10000
  percentile_limit = 1000
```

The full reference to all the available StatsD-related options in Telegraf is
[here][telegraf-statsd-input].

Now we can configure inputs for things like CPU, memory, network I/O, and disk
I/O. Most of them don't require any configuration, but make sure the
`interfaces` list in `inputs.net` matches the interface names you see in
`ifconfig`.

```toml
[[inputs.cpu]]
  percpu = true
  totalcpu = true
  collect_cpu_time = false

[[inputs.disk]]
  # mount_points = ["/"]
  # ignore_fs = ["tmpfs", "devtmpfs"]

[[inputs.diskio]]
  # devices = ["sda", "sdb"]
  # skip_serial_number = false

[[inputs.kernel]]
  # no configuration

[[inputs.linux_sysctl_fs]]
  # no configuration

[[inputs.mem]]
  # no configuration

[[inputs.net]]
  interfaces = ["enp0s*"]

[[inputs.netstat]]
  # no configuration

[[inputs.processes]]
  # no configuration

[[inputs.swap]]
  # no configuration

[[inputs.system]]
  # no configuration
```

Another useful plugin is the [procstat][telegraf-procstat-input] plugin, which
reports metrics for processes you select:

```toml
[[inputs.procstat]]
  pattern = "(consul)"
```

Telegraf even includes a [plugin][telegraf-consul-input] that monitors the
health checks associated with the Consul agent, using Consul API to query the
data.

It's important to note: the plugin itself will not report the telemetry, Consul
will report those stats already using StatsD protocol.

```toml
[[inputs.consul]]
  address = "localhost:8500"
  scheme = "http"
```

## Telegraf Configuration for Consul

Asking Consul to send telemetry to Telegraf is as simple as adding a `telemetry`
section to your agent configuration:

```json
{
  "telemetry": {
    "dogstatsd_addr": "localhost:8125",
    "disable_hostname": true
  }
}
```

As you can see, we only need to specify two options. The `dogstatsd_addr`
specifies the hostname and port of the StatsD daemon.

Note that we specify DogStatsD format instead of plain StatsD, which tells
Consul to send [tags][tagging] with each metric. Tags can be used by Grafana to
filter data on your dashboards (for example, displaying only the data for which
`role=consul-server`. Telegraf is compatible with the DogStatsD format and
allows us to add our own tags too.

The second option tells Consul not to insert the hostname in the names of the
metrics it sends to StatsD, since the hostnames will be sent as tags. Without
this option, the single metric `consul.raft.apply` would become multiple
metrics:

        consul.server1.raft.apply
        consul.server2.raft.apply
        consul.server3.raft.apply

If you are using a different agent (e.g. Circonus, Statsite, or plain StatsD),
you may want to change this configuration, and you can find the configuration
reference [here][consul-telemetry-config].

## Visualising Telegraf Consul Metrics

You can use a tool like [Grafana][] or [Chronograf][] to visualize metrics from
Telegraf.

Here is an example Grafana dashboard:

<div class="center">
  [![Grafana Consul
  Cluster](/img/grafana-screenshot.png)](/img/grafana-screenshot.png)
</div>

## Metric Aggregates and Alerting from Telegraf

### Memory usage

| Metric Name         | Description                                                    |
| :------------------ | :------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `mem.total`         | Total amount of physical memory (RAM) available on the server. |
| `mem.used_percent`  | Percentage of physical memory in use.                          |
| `swap.used_percent` | Percentage of swap space in use.                               |

**Why they're important:** Consul keeps all of its data in memory. If Consul
consumes all available memory, it will crash. You should also monitor total
available RAM to make sure some RAM is available for other processes, and swap
usage should remain at 0% for best performance.

**What to look for:** If `mem.used_percent` is over 90%, or if
`swap.used_percent` is greater than 0.

### File descriptors

| Metric Name                | Description                                                         |
| :------------------------- | :------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| `linux_sysctl_fs.file-nr`  | Number of file handles being used across all processes on the host. |
| `linux_sysctl_fs.file-max` | Total number of available file handles.                             |

**Why it's important:** Practically anything Consul does -- receiving a
connection from another host, sending data between servers, writing snapshots to
disk -- requires a file descriptor handle. If Consul runs out of handles, it
will stop accepting connections. See [the Consul FAQ][consul_faq_fds] for more
details.

By default, process and kernel limits are fairly conservative. You will want to
increase these beyond the defaults.

**What to look for:** If `file-nr` exceeds 80% of `file-max`.

### CPU usage

| Metric Name      | Description                                                      |
| :--------------- | :--------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `cpu.user_cpu`   | Percentage of CPU being used by user processes (such as Consul). |
| `cpu.iowait_cpu` | Percentage of CPU time spent waiting for I/O tasks to complete.  |

**Why they're important:** Consul is not particularly demanding of CPU time, but
a spike in CPU usage might indicate too many operations taking place at once,
and `iowait_cpu` is critical -- it means Consul is waiting for data to be
written to disk, a sign that Raft might be writing snapshots to disk too often.

**What to look for:** if `cpu.iowait_cpu` greater than 10%.

### Network activity - Bytes Recived

| Metric Name      | Description                                  |
| :--------------- | :------------------------------------------- |
| `net.bytes_recv` | Bytes received on each network interface.    |
| `net.bytes_sent` | Bytes transmitted on each network interface. |

**Why they're important:** A sudden spike in network traffic to Consul might be
the result of a misconfigured application client causing too many requests to
Consul. This is the raw data from the system, rather than a specific Consul
metric.

**What to look for:** Sudden large changes to the `net` metrics (greater than
50% deviation from baseline).

**NOTE:** The `net` metrics are counters, so in order to calculate rates (such
as bytes/second), you will need to apply a function such as
[non_negative_difference][].

### Disk activity

| Metric Name          | Description                         |
| :------------------- | :---------------------------------- |
| `diskio.read_bytes`  | Bytes read from each block device.  |
| `diskio.write_bytes` | Bytes written to each block device. |

**Why they're important:** If the Consul host is writing a lot of data to disk,
such as under high volume workloads, there may be frequent major I/O spikes
during leader elections. This is because under heavy load, Consul is
checkpointing Raft snapshots to disk frequently.

It may also be caused by Consul having debug/trace logging enabled in
production, which can impact performance.

Too much disk I/O can cause the rest of the system to slow down or become
unavailable, as the kernel spends all its time waiting for I/O to complete.

**What to look for:** Sudden large changes to the `diskio` metrics (greater than
50% deviation from baseline, or more than 3 standard deviations from baseline).

**NOTE:** The `diskio` metrics are counters, so in order to calculate rates
(such as bytes/second), you will need to apply a function such as
[non_negative_difference][].

## Summary

In this guide you learned how to set up Telegraf with Consul to collect metrics,
and considered your options for visualizing, aggregating, and alerting on those
metrics. To learn about other factors (in addition to monitoring) that you
should consider when running Consul in production, see the [Production Checklist][prod-checklist].

[non_negative_difference]: https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.5/query_language/functions/#non-negative-difference
[consul_faq_fds]: https://www.consul.io/docs/faq.html#q-does-consul-require-certain-user-process-resource-limits-
[telegraf_plugin]: https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/tree/master/plugins/inputs/consul
[telegraf-install]: https://docs.influxdata.com/telegraf/v1.6/introduction/installation/
[telegraf-consul-input]: https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/tree/release-1.6/plugins/inputs/consul
[telegraf-statsd-input]: https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/tree/release-1.6/plugins/inputs/statsd
[telegraf-procstat-input]: https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/tree/release-1.6/plugins/inputs/procstat
[telegraf-input-plugins]: https://docs.influxdata.com/telegraf/v1.6/plugins/inputs/
[tagging]: https://docs.datadoghq.com/getting_started/tagging/
[consul-telemetry-config]: https://www.consul.io/docs/agent/options.html#telemetry
[consul-telemetry-ref]: https://www.consul.io/docs/agent/telemetry.html
[telegraf-input-plugins]: https://docs.influxdata.com/telegraf/v1.6/plugins/inputs/
[grafana]: https://www.influxdata.com/partners/grafana/
[chronograf]: https://www.influxdata.com/time-series-platform/chronograf/
[prod-checklist]: https://learn.hashicorp.com/consul/advanced/day-1-operations/production-checklist
