Section Overview Monitor a Vault Environment

In this lesson, we cover Objective 2: Monitoring a Vault Environment. While this section is concise, understanding Vault telemetry, audit logs, and operational logs is critical for both real-world operations and the Vault Operations Professional exam.

Below is an objective overview:

The image is a slide titled "Objective Overview" focusing on monitoring a Vault environment, with three points: understanding Vault telemetry, audit logs, and operational logs. It also features a certification badge and a cartoon character at the bottom.

Sub-objectives:

Monitor and understand Vault telemetry
Monitor and understand Vault audit logs
Monitor and understand Vault operational logs

Note

“Understand” requires conceptual knowledge; “monitor” implies hands-on experience with setup or output analysis.

Vault Telemetry

Vault telemetry provides runtime metrics on performance, resource usage, and component health. Leveraging telemetry helps you:

Detect performance bottlenecks
Debug latency spikes
Track cluster health over time

The image is a slide explaining telemetry, highlighting its use in collecting runtime metrics for performance monitoring and debugging in a Vault environment. It mentions metrics aggregation every 10 seconds and the use of agents like DataDog or Prometheus for data aggregation.

Key telemetry attributes:

Metrics examples: request latency, storage write/read durations, seal/unseal status
Aggregation interval: every 10 seconds
In-memory retention: 1 minute
Collection agents: Datadog Agent, Prometheus node_exporter, etc., polling Vault then forwarding data upstream

Supported Telemetry Providers

Configure your monitoring backend in the telemetry stanza of config.hcl. Vault supports:

Provider	Protocol	Common Use Case
statsite	Carbon	Graphite integrations
statsd	StatsD	Generic metrics pipelines
circonus	Circonus	High-scale monitoring
dogstatsd	DogStatsD	Datadog
prometheus	Prometheus	Prometheus + Grafana
stackdriver	Stackdriver	Google Cloud Monitoring

The image lists providers supported by Vault, including statsite, statsd, circonus, dogstatsd, prometheus, and stackdriver. It also features a Vault certification badge and a cartoon character at the bottom.

Example Telemetry Metrics

Vault emits dozens of metrics covering HTTP handlers, storage backends, memory usage, and GC pauses:

Metric	Description
`vault.core.handleRequest`	Duration of handled requests (ms)
`vault.runtime.totalGCPauseNS`	GC stop-the-world pause duration (ns)
`vault.runtime.memoryUsePercentage`	Percentage of physical memory in use (%)
`vault.runtime.memoryUseTotalBytes`	Total physical memory used (bytes)
`vault.audit.log.request`	Time to write to all audit devices (ms)
`vault.policy.getPolicy`	Policy retrieval latency (ms)

The image is a table listing various metrics collected by Vault, along with their descriptions, such as request handling duration and memory usage. It also includes a Vault certification badge in the top right corner.

For the full list of metrics, see the official Vault telemetry documentation.

Configuring Telemetry

Add or update the telemetry block in your Vault HCL config (config.hcl), then restart or reload Vault:

telemetry {
  dogstatsd_addr = "metrics.hcvop.com:8125"
  dogstatsd_tags = ["vault_env:production"]
}

seal "transit" {
  address  = "transit.hcvop.com:8200"
  key_name = "autounseal"
}

Replace dogstatsd_* with the settings for your chosen backend (Prometheus, statsd, etc.).

Telemetry Workflow

Vault emits metrics locally → Telemetry agent collects them → Aggregation platform visualizes data:

The image illustrates a telemetry workflow involving a Vault Admin configuring a Vault Server, which sends metrics to an aggregation platform for creating dashboards and alerts.

Vault server with telemetry stanza
Local agent (sidecar or host)
Aggregation platform (Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus + Grafana, etc.)
Dashboards, alerts, and capacity planning

Sample Dashboard

Below is a Datadog dashboard example showing latency, GC pauses, login rates, and storage metrics:

The image shows a dashboard for monitoring Vault, featuring various performance metrics, logs, and runtime statistics. It includes graphs and data visualizations for system analysis.

Key panels include:

Garbage collection pause durations
Login request rate and P99 latency
Token creation throughput
Consul storage operations (put/get/delete)

Exam Tip

Be prepared to:

Define Vault telemetry
Identify common metrics
Locate the telemetry stanza in the Vault HCL config
Practical setup is unlikely, but you may be asked where to add telemetry settings.

Next up, we will explore Vault audit logs.

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