consul ui remote access

How do I access the consul web interface?

In your local web browser, you can now access the consul web interface by typing: This will give you the default web UI page: You can use this interface to check the health of your servers and get an overview of your services and infrastructure. When you are finished using the web UI, you can close the SSH tunnel.

How do I connect to a remote machine using consul?

Consul serves the HTTP interface on port 8500. We will tunnel our local port 8500 to the client machine’s port 8500. On your local computer, type: This will connect to the remote machine, create a tunnel between our local port and the remote port and then put the connection into the background.

How do I restrict access to consul from the outside?

to your configuration or add the option -client 0.0.0.0to the command line of consul to make your Web UI accessible from the outside (see the docs for more information). Please note that this will also make your Consul REST API accessible from the outside. Depending on your environment you might want to activate Consul's ACLs to restrict access.

What does the consul ui do?

The Consul UI automatically updates the detection of the number of data centers Consul is working on. The Consul UI also provides you a Services tab to configure and view services that are currently deployed using Consul. It provides us an option to configure services depending on the nodes.

How do you access the Consul UI?

You can view the output of Consul UI using the following command over any agent. The output would be as shown in the following screenshot. By default, you will observe the UI at http://localhost:8500/ui. The /ui part is same as the consul's HTTP API.

Does Nomad require Consul?

Configuration. In order to use Consul with Nomad, you will need to configure and install Consul on your nodes alongside Nomad, or schedule it as a system job. Nomad does not currently run Consul for you.

What does RPC stand for in Consul?

Consul uses the remote procedure call (RPC) pattern for communication between client and server nodes. When a Consul client makes a request for data within another datacenter, a server forwards the RPC to a server in the appropriate datacenter.

What is Consul ACL?

Consul uses Access Control Lists (ACLs) to secure access to the UI, API, CLI, service communications, and agent communications. When securing your datacenter you should configure the ACLs first. At the core, ACLs operate by grouping rules into policies, then associating one or more policies with a token.

How many Consul servers are there?

Consul supports traditional three-tier applications as well as microservices. Typically, there must be three or five servers to balance between availability and performance. These servers together run the Raft-driven consistent state store for catalog, session, prepared query, ACL, and KV updates.

How does Consul Connect work?

Intentions verify connections between services by source and destination name seamlessly across datacenters. Connections can be made via gateways to enable communicating across network topologies, allowing connections between services in each datacenter without externally routable IPs at the service level.

Why is Consul used?

Consul provides many different features that are used to provide consistent and available information about your infrastructure. This includes service and node discovery mechanisms, a tagging system, health checks, consensus-based election routines, system-wide key/value storage, and more.

What port does Consul use?

Consul requires up to 6 different ports to work properly, some on TCP, UDP, or both protocols....Ports Table.UseDefault PortsHTTP: The HTTP API (TCP Only)8500HTTPS: The HTTPs APIdisabled (8501)*gRPC: The gRPC APIdisabled (8502)*LAN Serf: The Serf LAN port (TCP and UDP)83015 more rows

Does Consul use raft?

Raft in Consul Only Consul server nodes participate in Raft and are part of the peer set. All client nodes forward requests to servers. Part of the reason for this design is that, as more members are added to the peer set, the size of the quorum also increases.

What is a Consul session?

A session in Consul represents a contract that has very specific semantics. When a session is constructed, a node name, a list of health checks, a behavior, a TTL, and a lock-delay may be provided. The newly constructed session is provided with a named ID that can be used to identify it.

What is Consul agent?

»Consul Agent The consul agent command is the heart of Consul: it runs the agent that performs the important task of maintaining membership information, running checks, announcing services, handling queries, etc. Due to the power and flexibility of this command, the Consul agent is documented in its own section.

What is ACL policy?

An access control list policy, or ACL policy, is the set of rules (permissions) that specifies the conditions necessary to perform certain operations on that resource. ACL policy definitions are important components of the security policy established for the secure domain.

What is Nomad and consul?

Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable. On the other hand, Nomad is detailed as "A cluster manager and scheduler". Nomad is a cluster manager, designed for both long lived services and short lived batch processing workloads.

What is Nomad written in?

AssemblerUnlike RAMIS, which was largely written in FORTRAN, NOMAD was written entirely in Assembler.

What is Nomad service?

Nomad is a flexible scheduler and workload orchestrator that enables an organization to easily deploy and manage any containerized or legacy application using a single, unified workflow. Nomad can run a diverse workload of Docker, non-containerized, microservice, and batch applications.

What is consul service discovery?

One of the major use cases for Consul is service discovery. Consul provides a DNS interface that downstream services can use to find the IP addresses of their upstream dependencies. Consul knows where these services are located because each service registers with its local Consul client.

How does UI query metrics provider?

The UI must query the metrics provider through a proxy endpoint. This simplifies deployment where Prometheus is not exposed externally to UI user's browsers.

Why should providers make it clear to users which paths are required?

Provider authors should make it clear to users which paths are required so they can correctly configure the path allowlist in the metrics proxy to avoid exposing more than needed of the metrics backend.

What is the default value for metrics_proxy.path_allowlist?

The default value for metrics_proxy.path_allowlist is ["/api/v1/query_range", "/api/v1/query"] as required by the built-in prometheus provider .

Can a UI agent proxy for metrics?

In many cases the metrics backend may be inaccessible to UI user's browsers or may be on a different domain and so subject to CORS restrictions. To make it simpler to serve the metrics to the UI in these cases, the Consul agent can proxy requests for metrics from the UI to the backend.

Can Consul be run in Kubernetes?

If running Consul in Kubernetes, the Helm chart can automatically configure Consul's UI to display topology visualizations. See our Kubernetes observability docs for more information.

Can you configure a dashboard URL in Consul?

Since Consul's visualization is intended as an overview of your mesh and not a comprehensive monitoring tool, you can configure a service dashboard URL template which allows users to click directly through to the relevant service-specific dashboard in an external tool like Grafana or a hosted provider.

Does Consul Connect have metrics?

This means that the Prometheus server that the Consul agent serving the UI can access likely only has metrics for the local datacenter and a full solution would need additional proxying or exposing remote Prometheus servers on the network in remote datacenters. Later we may support an easy way to set this up via Consul Connect but initially we don't attempt to fetch metrics in the UI if you are browsing a remote datacenter.

What is Consul UI?

The Consul UI also provides you a Services tab to configure and view services that are currently deployed using Consul. It provides us an option to configure services depending on the nodes.

What is consul interface?

Consul provides us with a useful interface using that we can manage things at ease. You can easily bring up the consul user interface on any port you desire. The Consul UI can be divided into three important parts, which are −

Where is the settings option in Consul?

Settings. You can check the settings option of the Consul UI on the top right hand side of the screen. Upon clicking that option, you can easily see that Consul provides you an option using which you can configure its local storage settings and token system for verification.

How to turn on ACL in Consul?

One of the easiest way to turn on the ACL’s is to add a new json file in Consul’s data directory. To enable and update the ACL, you can add the master ACL token in the field in settings, and refresh it using the ACL tab

What is a consul?

Consul automates networking for simple and secure application delivery.

What is Consul service mesh?

Consul service mesh works on any Kubernetes distribution, connects multiple clusters, and supports VM-based applications. Consul CRDs provide a self-service, Kubernetes native workflow to manage traffic patterns and permissions in the mesh.

What gateway is used to connect external applications to the mesh?

Enable external applications to securely connect with service inside of the mesh using Consul’s Ingress Gateway.

What is Consul?

Consul is a distributed, highly available, datacenter-aware, service discovery and configuration system. It can be used to present services and nodes in a flexible and powerful interface that allows clients to always have an up-to-date view of the infrastructure they are a part of.

How to copy a consul link?

On the consul website, right-click the link to the consul web UI and select “copy link location” or whatever similar option you have.

What does su do in bootstrap?

On a server that contains the bootstrap configuration file ( server1 in our case), use su to change to the consul user briefly. We can then call consul and pass in the bootstrap directory as an argument:

Why do consuls have odd number of servers?

They store information about services and key/value information. An odd number of servers is necessary to avoid stalemate issues during elections. Apart from the consul servers, other machines can run consul agents. Consul agents are very light-weight and simply forward requests to the servers.

Where to put executable in terminal?

In your terminal, move to the /usr/local/bin directory, where we will keep the executable. Type wget and a space, and then paste the URL that you copied from the site:

Can you put a configuration file on a consul server?

You can put this configuration file on only one of your consul servers, or on all of them to give you more options for bootstrapping. We will only be putting it on server1 for this demonstration.

Can consuls be bootstrapped?

You should now have a stable way of managing your consul members. The consul cluster can be bootstrapped and started up quickly and easily. Additional nodes can be configured quickly by copying the configuration files (consul config and upstart script) of the existing servers.

Context

This ADR defines the motiviation and approach used to secure access to the Consul component in the EdgeX architecture for security-enabled configurations only . Non-secure configuations continue to use Consul in anonymous read-write mode.

Decision

Consul will be configured with access control list (ACL) functionality enabled, and each EdgeX service will utilize a Consul access token to authenticate to Consul. Consul access tokens will be requested from the Vault Consul secrets engine (to avoid introducing additional bootstrapping secrets).

Consequences

Full implementation of this ADR will deny Consul access to all existing Consul clients. To limit the impacts of the change, deployment will take place in phases. Phase 1 is basic plumbing work and leaves Consul configured in a permissive mode and thus is not a breaking change.

Why do cloud engineers take the vault associate exam?

Cloud engineers can use the Vault Associate exam to verify their knowledge of basic security automation and best practices.

What is ACL in vault?

Create and manage access control list (ACL) policies to control access to secrets managed by Vault.

»Kubernetes

»Configuring The UI to Display Metrics

• To configure Consul's UI to fetch metrics there are two required configuration settings.These need to be set on each Consul Agent that is responsible for serving theUI. If there are multiple clients with the UI enabled in a datacenter forredundancy these configurations must be added to all of them. We assume that the UI is already enabled by settin...

See more on consul.io

»Configuring Dashboard URLs

»Custom Metrics Providers

»Current Limitations