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Monitoring and service discovery with Consul

Staying on Top

Article from ADMIN 44/2018

By Martin Loschwitz

When dozens of new services and VMs emerge and disappear every day in dynamic cloud environments, conventional monitoring provides false alarms, not operational security.

The cloud is rightly considered one of the most significant developments in IT in recent years: It clearly divides the industry into two groups – service providers and users – each of which has specific requirements.

One requirement concerns monitoring: Conventional monitoring in a cloud makes neither the providers of the large platforms nor their users happy, because what makes the cloud special is that it serves up resources dynamically. If the user needs a large amount of power at the moment, they book a corresponding number of virtual machines (VMs). If they only need a fraction of these resources later on, they return the redundant capacity to the cloud provider's pool.

The pool, however, must be monitored very carefully by the provider. The provider needs to know at all times how many resources can still be distributed to users – and when it's time to scale up the platform by adding more hardware.

A Different Kind of Monitoring

From the user's and the provider's point of view, traditional monitoring approaches are of limited suitability for monitoring cloud platforms. Their view of the world is usually binary: Either a system or a service works as required, so that the corresponding entry on the monitoring system is green, or not, in which case the entry is red, and an escalation spiral is set in motion (Figure 1). If necessary, admins are dragged from their beds.

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