Darron Froese, a Datadog engineer, shares his team's experience with using Consul for about 18 months in their production stack. Consul helps distribute configuration and discover service endpoints across the cluster. Key recommendations include: giving server nodes more CPU power to minimize leadership transitions, using git2consul for fast auditable configuration changes, utilizing Access Control Lists (ACLs) to secure data, monitoring Consul with metrics such as leader reconciliation count, DNS query count, and CPU/networking usage to ensure a healthy cluster. Additionally, using dnsmasq can help lighten the load on Consul by caching DNS queries and reducing the number of requests hitting Consul directly.