HCP Consul Central overview

This topic provides an overview for using HCP Consul Central, a hosted management plane service. HCP Consul Central is an interface that centralizes global management operations across all Consul clusters. It provides global visibility and control for both HCP Consul Dedicated and self-managed Consul clusters, even when you deploy services in multiple cloud environments and regions.

For an explanation of what HCP Consul Central is and the benefits it provides, refer to HCP Consul Central.

Prerequisites

To link self-managed Consul clusters to HCP Consul Central, your clusters must run Consul v1.14.3 or later. Refer to Upgrade clusters with HCP Consul Central if the cluster you want to use runs an older version of Consul.

Some HCP Consul Central features have additional version requirements. Refer to the following table for details.

Some HCP Consul Central features are not available for clusters running the community edition of Consul. Refer to trial account for more information about accessing these features for a 90 day trial.

Get started

To get started with HCP Consul Central, sign in to the HCP portal. Then, select Consul.

HCP displays HCP Consul Central's Consul overview as the landing page when you enter an organization's HCP environment. For more information about the contents of this page, as well as the other views and workflows that HCP Consul Central provides, refer to Global network views.

Deploy HCP Consul Dedicated clusters

When you create HCP Consul Dedicated clusters, they automatically connect to HCP Consul Central. You can create HCP Consul Dedicated clusters with Terraform, or you can create them manually using the UI workflow. Refer to Create a HCP Consul Dedicated cluster for more information.

For step-by-step instructions on deploying HCP Consul Dedicated clusters, refer to the deploy HCP Consul Dedicated tutorial.

Link self-managed Community and Enterprise clusters

HCP Consul Central also supports self-managed Consul clusters that you install, configure, and manage yourself. Linking self-managed Community and Enterprise clusters to HCP Consul Central can help you streamline network operations while maintaining control over your clusters.

You can create new self-managed Community and Enterprise clusters on VMs or Kubernetes that link automatically, or you can link an existing cluster that is already deployed to a cloud or on-prem environment. For more information, refer to Link self-managed Community and Enterprise clusters with HCP Consul Dedicated.

HashiCups demo app

By default, the code you copy from HCP includes a -demo flag. This flag deploys the HashiCups application so that you can view HCP Consul Central features in action immediately. If you prefer not to install the sample app, remove the -demo flag before you run the command.

To access the HashiCups app on Kubernetes, run the following command to make it accessible in a browser at http://localhost:8080:

$ kubectl port-forward service/nginx 8080:80

To remove the demo app after installation without uninstalling Consul on Kubernetes, run the following CLI command:

$ helm delete consul-demo -n consul

Global management views

You can use HCP Consul Central to view information about both HCP Consul Dedicated and self-managed Community and Enterprise clusters, including their current health and registered services. In addition, HCP Consul Central provides simplified workflows for creating and managing cluster peering connections, as well as updating the version of HCP Consul Dedicated clusters.

For more information about the information provided by HCP Consul Central, refer to global network views.

Observability dashboard

For clusters running Consul v1.16 or later, HCP Consul Central provides an observability dashboard. This dashboard visualizes server and proxy metrics for both HCP Consul Dedicated and self-managed Community and Enterprise clusters to provide insights into Consul’s operations when monitoring or debugging your network’s performance.

The observability dashboard requires the deployment of an automated telemetry collector that gathers server and proxy metrics. Refer to Deploy the Consul telemetry collector for more information about how and when to deploy the collector manually.

For more information about the observability dashboard, including examples of the visualizations it provides and the specific telemetry metrics used to generate the dashboard, refer to Consul observability.