HashiCorp Consul is a software solution designed for managing clusters by facilitating service discovery and configuration across distributed systems. Released in 2014, it is widely adopted for its capabilities in service discovery, distributed key-value storage, automated health checks, and its recent addition of a service mesh. Consul operates by running an agent on each host, ensuring consistent network and configuration data is accessible across the cluster, using the Raft algorithm for data consistency and the Gossip protocol for membership information dissemination. Monitoring these components is crucial for maintaining cluster health; the article explains the importance of tracking various metrics related to Raft and Gossip protocols, resource utilization, and communication effectiveness to ensure optimal performance and reliability of the distributed system. Consul's metrics are accessible through the go-metrics library, offering insights into leadership transitions, Raft commits, and communication protocols, while also addressing how to manage memory usage effectively.