hcp-consul

Monitoring HCP Consul with OpenTelemetry Collector

This simple example demonstrates monitoring HCP Consul prometheus metrics with the OpenTelemetry collector, using the prometheus receiver and sending the data to New Relic via OTLP.

Requirements

• You need to have a Kubernetes cluster, and the kubectl command-line tool must be configured to communicate with your cluster. Docker desktop includes a standalone Kubernetes server and client which is useful for local testing.
• A New Relic account
• A New Relic license key
• An HCP Consul Account with a running cluster
• A HCP Consul admin access token

Running the example

1. Update the NEW_RELIC_API_KEY values HCP_ACCESS_TOKEN values in secrets.yaml to your New Relic license key, and HCP Consule admin access token respectively. See HCP Consule docs for obtaining an access token.

   # ...omitted for brevity
   stringData:
      # New Relic API key to authenticate the export requests.
      # docs: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/apis/intro-apis/new-relic-api-keys/#license-key
      NEW_RELIC_API_KEY: <INSERT_API_KEY>
      # Set your HCP Access Token API Key.
      # docs: https://developer.hashicorp.com/hcp/docs/consul/hcp-managed/access#generate-admin-token
      HCP_ACCESS_TOKEN: <INSERT_API_KEY>>

   • Note, be careful to avoid inadvertent secret sharing when modifying secrets.yaml. To ignore changes to this file from git, run git update-index --skip-worktree k8s/secrets.yaml.

   • If your account is based in the EU, update the NEW_RELIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT value in collector.yaml the endpoint to: https://otlp.eu01.nr-data.net

   # ...omitted for brevity
   env:
    # The default US endpoint is set here. You can change the endpoint and port based on your requirements if needed.
    # docs: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/more-integrations/open-source-telemetry-integrations/opentelemetry/best-practices/opentelemetry-otlp/#configure-endpoint-port-protocol
    - name: NEW_RELIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT
      value: https://otlp.eu01.nr-data.net

2. Set the HCP_ACCESS_URL env var value in collector.yaml. See HCP Consul docs for details on obtaining org and workspace group ids.

   # ...omitted for brevity
   # The HCP Consul access url.
   # docs: https://developer.hashicorp.com/hcp/docs/consul/hcp-managed/access#get-access-url
   - name: HCP_ACCESS_URL
    value: <INSERT_HCP_ACCESS_URL>

3. Run the application with the following command.

   kubectl apply -f k8s/

   • When finished, cleanup resources with the following command. This is also useful to reset if modifying configuration.

   kubectl delete -f k8s/

Viewing your data

To review your HCP Consul data in New Relic, navigate to "New Relic -> Query Your Data". To list the metrics reported, query for:

FROM Metric SELECT uniques(metricName) WHERE otel.library.name = 'otelcol/prometheusreceiver' AND metricName LIKE 'consul%'

See get started with querying for additional details on querying data in New Relic.

Additional notes

The prometheus receiver includes service.name and service.instance.id resource attributes derived from job name and target configured in .receivers.prometheus.config.scrape_configs. As documented here, New Relic considers any data with service.name as a service despite the fact that not all prometheus data sources are services. As a result, you can find a hcp-consul entity under "New Relic -> All Entities -> Services - OpenTelemetry", although the panels will not contain data because the scraped metrics do not represent APM data.