---
layout: "docs"
page_title: "Guides"
sidebar_current: "docs-guides"
---

# Consul Guides

This section provides various guides for common actions. Due to the nature
of Consul, some of these procedures can be complex, so our goal is to provide
guidance to do them safely.

The following guides are available:

 * [Adding/Removing Servers](/docs/guides/servers.html) - This guide covers how to safely add
 and remove Consul servers from the cluster. This should be done carefully to avoid availability
 outages.

 * [Bootstrapping](/docs/guides/bootstrapping.html) - This guide covers bootstrapping a new
 datacenter. This covers safely adding the initial Consul servers.

 * [DNS Forwarding](/docs/guides/forwarding.html) - Forward DNS queries from Bind to Consul

 * [External Services](/docs/guides/external.html) - This guide covers registering
 an external service. This allows using 3rd party services within the Consul framework.

 * [Multiple Datacenters](/docs/guides/datacenters.html) - Configuring Consul to support multiple
 datacenters.

 * [Outage Recovery](/docs/guides/outage.html) - This guide covers recovering a cluster
 that has become unavailable due to server failures.