open-consul/website/source/docs/agent/telemetry.html.markdown

layout	page_title	sidebar_current	description
docs	Telemetry	docs-agent-telemetry	The Consul agent collects various runtime metrics about the performance of different libraries and subsystems. These metrics are aggregated on a ten second interval and are retained for one minute.

Telemetry

The Consul agent collects various runtime metrics about the performance of different libraries and subsystems. These metrics are aggregated on a ten second interval and are retained for one minute.

To view this data, you must send a signal to the Consul process: on Unix, this is USR1 while on Windows it is BREAK. Once Consul receives the signal, it will dump the current telemetry information to the agent's stderr.

This telemetry information can be used for debugging or otherwise getting a better view of what Consul is doing.

Additionally, if the telemetry configuration options are provided, the telemetry information will be streamed to a statsite or statsd server where it can be aggregated and flushed to Graphite or any other metrics store.

Below is sample output of a telemetry dump:

[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][G] 'consul-agent.runtime.num_goroutines': 19.000
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][G] 'consul-agent.runtime.alloc_bytes': 755960.000
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][G] 'consul-agent.runtime.malloc_count': 7550.000
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][G] 'consul-agent.runtime.free_count': 4387.000
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][G] 'consul-agent.runtime.heap_objects': 3163.000
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][G] 'consul-agent.runtime.total_gc_pause_ns': 1151002.000
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][G] 'consul-agent.runtime.total_gc_runs': 4.000
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][C] 'consul-agent.agent.ipc.accept': Count: 5 Sum: 5.000
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][C] 'consul-agent.agent.ipc.command': Count: 10 Sum: 10.000
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][C] 'consul-agent.serf.events': Count: 5 Sum: 5.000
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][C] 'consul-agent.serf.events.foo': Count: 4 Sum: 4.000
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][C] 'consul-agent.serf.events.baz': Count: 1 Sum: 1.000
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][S] 'consul-agent.memberlist.gossip': Count: 50 Min: 0.007 Mean: 0.020 Max: 0.041 Stddev: 0.007 Sum: 0.989
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][S] 'consul-agent.serf.queue.Intent': Count: 10 Sum: 0.000
[2014-01-29 10:56:50 -0800 PST][S] 'consul-agent.serf.queue.Event': Count: 10 Min: 0.000 Mean: 2.500 Max: 5.000 Stddev: 2.121 Sum: 25.000

Key Metrics

When telemetry is being streamed to an external metrics store, the interval is defined to be that store's flush interval. Otherwise, the interval can be assumed to be 10 seconds when retrieving metrics from the built-in store using the above described signals.

Agent Health

These metrics are used to monitor the health of specific Consul agents.

Metric	Description	Unit	Type
`consul.runtime.num_goroutines`	This tracks the number of running goroutines and is a general load pressure indicator. This may burst from time to time but should return to a steady state value.	number of goroutines	gauge
`consul.runtime.alloc_bytes`	This measures the number of bytes allocated by the Consul process. This may burst from time to time but should return to a steady state value.	bytes	gauge
`consul.runtime.heap_objects`	This measures the number of objects allocated on the heap and is a general memory pressure indicator. This may burst from time to time but should return to a steady state value.	number of objects	gauge

Server Health

These metrics are used to monitor the health of the Consul servers.

Metric	Description	Unit	Type
`consul.raft.state.leader`	This increments whenever a Consul server becomes a leader. If there are frequent leadership changes this may be indication that the servers are overloaded and aren't meeting the soft real-time requirements for Raft, or that there are networking problems between the servers.	leadership transitions / interval	counter
`consul.raft.state.candidate`	This increments whenever a Consul server starts an election. If this increments without a leadership change occurring it could indicate that a single server is overloaded or is experiencing network connectivity issues.	election attempts / interval	counter
`consul.raft.apply`	This counts the number of Raft transactions occurring over the interval, which is a general indicator of the write load on the Consul servers.	raft transactions / interval	counter
`consul.raft.commitTime`	This measures the time it takes to commit a new entry to the Raft log on the leader.	ms	timer
`consul.raft.leader.dispatchLog`	This measures the time it takes for the leader to write log entries to disk.	ms	timer
`consul.raft.replication.appendEntries`	This measures the time it takes to replicate log entries to followers. This is a general indicator of the load pressure on the Consul servers, as well as the performance of the communication between the servers.	ms	timer
`consul.raft.leader.lastContact`	This will only be emitted by the Raft leader and measures the time since the leader was last able to contact the follower nodes when checking its leader lease. It can be used as a measure for how stable the Raft timing is and how close the leader is to timing out its lease. The lease timeout is 500 ms times the [`raft_multiplier` configuration](/docs/agent/options.html#raft_multiplier), so this telemetry value should not be getting close to that configured value, otherwise the Raft timing is marginal and might need to be tuned, or more powerful servers might be needed. See the [Server Performance](/docs/guides/performance.html) guide for more details.	ms	timer

Cluster Health

These metrics give insight into the health of the cluster as a whole.

Metric	Description	Unit	Type
`consul.memberlist.msg.suspect`	This increments when an agent suspects another as failed when executing random probes as part of the gossip protocol. These can be an indicator of overloaded agents, network problems, or configuration errors where agents can not connect to each other on the [required ports](/docs/agent/options.html#ports).	suspect messages received / interval	counter
`consul.serf.member.flap`	Available in Consul 0.7 and later, this increments when an agent is marked dead and then recovers within a short time period. This can be an indicator of overloaded agents, network problems, or configuration errors where agents can not connect to each other on the [required ports](/docs/agent/options.html#ports).	flaps / interval	counter
`consul.serf.events`	This increments when an agent processes an [event](/docs/commands/event.html). Note that Consul uses events internally so there may be additional events showing in telemetry. There are also a per-event counters emitted as `consul.serf.events.`.	events / interval	counter
`consul.dns.domain_query.`	This tracks how long it takes to service forward DNS lookups on the given Consul agent.	ms	timer
`consul.dns.ptr_query.`	This tracks how long it takes to service reverse DNS lookups on the given Consul agent.	ms	timer
`consul.dns.stale_queries`	Available in Consul 0.7.1 and later, this increments when an agent serves a DNS query based on information from a server that is more than 5 seconds out of date.	queries	counter
`consul.http..`	This tracks how long it takes to service the given HTTP request for the given verb and path. Note that paths do not include details like service or key names, for these an underscore will be present as a placeholder (eg. `consul.http.GET.v1.kv._`)	ms	timer