--- layout: docs page_title: Connect - Observability sidebar_title: Observability description: |- This page documents the configurations necessary for L7 observability using Consul Connect. --- # Observability In order to take advantage of Connect's L7 observability features you will need to: - Deploy sidecar proxies that are capable of emitting metrics with each of your services. We have first class support for Envoy. - Define where your proxies should send metrics that they collect. - Define the protocols for each of your services. - Define the upstreams for each of your services. If you are using Envoy as your sidecar proxy, you will need to [enable gRPC](/docs/agent/options#grpc_port) on your client agents. To define the metrics destination and service protocol you may want to enable [configuration entries](/docs/agent/options#config_entries) and [centralized service configuration](/docs/agent/options#enable_central_service_config). If you are using Kubernetes, the Helm chart can simplify much of the necessary configuration, which you can learn about in the [observability tutorial](https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/consul/kubernetes-layer7-observability). ### Metrics Destination For Envoy the metrics destination can be configured in the proxy configuration entry's `config` section. ``` kind = "proxy-defaults" name = "global" config { "envoy_dogstatsd_url": "udp://127.0.0.1:9125" } ``` Find other possible metrics syncs in the [Connect Envoy documentation](/docs/connect/proxies/envoy#bootstrap-configuration). ### Service Protocol You can specify the [service protocol](/docs/agent/config-entries/service-defaults#protocol) in the `service-defaults` configuration entry. You can override it in the [service registration](/docs/agent/services). By default, proxies only give you L4 metrics. This protocol allows proxies to handle requests at the right L7 protocol and emit richer L7 metrics. It also allows proxies to make per-request load balancing and routing decisions. ### Service Upstreams You can set the upstream for each service using the proxy's [`upstreams`](/docs/connect/registration/service-registration#upstreams) sidecar parameter, which can be defined in a service's [sidecar registration](/docs/connect/registration/sidecar-service).