* Service Discovery: Clients of Consul can provide a service, such as API or MySQL, and other clients can use Consul to discover providers of a given service. Using either DNS or HTTP, applications can easily find the services they depend upon. * Health Checking: Consul clients can provide any number of health checks, either associated with a given service ("is the webserver returning 200 OK"), or with the local node ("is memory utilization below 90%"). This information can be used by an operator to monitor cluster health, and it is used by the service discovery components to route traffic away from unhealthy hosts. * Key/Value Store: Applications can make use of Consul's hierarchical key/value store for any number of purposes, including dynamic configuration, feature flagging, coordination, leader election, and more. The simple HTTP API makes it easy to use. * Multi Datacenter: Consul supports multiple datacenters out of the box. This means users of Consul do not have to worry about building additional layers of abstraction to grow to multiple regions.

* Proactive - Monit can act if an error situation should occur, e.g.; if sendmail is not running, Monit can start sendmail again automatically or if apache is using too much resources (e.g. if a DoS attack is in progress) Monit can stop or restart apache and send you an alert message. * Processes - You can use Monit to monitor daemon processes or similar programs running on localhost. Monit is particularly useful for monitoring daemon processes, such as those started at system boot time from /etc/init/ For instance sendmail, sshd, apache and mysql. * Files, Dirs and Filesystems - You can also use Monit to monitor files, directories and filesystems on localhost. Monit can monitor these items for changes, such as timestamps changes, checksum changes or size changes. * Cloud and Hosts - Monitor network connections to various servers, either on localhost or on remote hosts. * Programs and scripts - Monit can be used to test programs or scripts at certain times, much like cron, but in addition, you can test the exit value of a program and perform an action or send an alert if the exit value indicates an error. * System - Finally, Monit can be used to monitor general system resources on localhost such as overall CPU usage, Memory and Load Average.