Consul is a distributed configuration and service-discovery tool that provides datacenter-aware architecture and high availability. It allows clients to register services and dynamically discover those services, enabling easy scaling and fault tolerance. Consul uses the Raft consensus algorithm for strong data consistency and is built on top of a distributed client-server architecture. The tool offers health checks for both node-level and service-level checks, allowing users to monitor cluster health and detect potential issues. Additionally, Consul provides metrics on latency, cluster health, events, tagging, and alerts, enabling users to create custom monitoring solutions with Datadog. By integrating Consul with Datadog, users can gain a comprehensive view of their infrastructure performance and optimize their applications for scalability and reliability.