This platform provides service discovery, identity-based authorization, service mesh features, L7 traffic management, and end-to-end service encryption to help teams manage connectivity between distributed applications. It supports both control plane and data plane components, including gateways and sidecar proxies for securing and observing application traffic.

Documentation and tutorials cover installs on VMs and Kubernetes, API and CLI usage, a browser UI, and a sandbox with preinstalled tools for experimentation. There are Community and Enterprise editions, plus integrations such as an official Terraform provider to manage Consul configuration, ACLs, and intentions.

Common use cases include registering services and health checks, implementing service mesh patterns with Envoy, exposing services via an API gateway, automating network changes with Consul-Terraform-Sync, and improving observability with metrics and tracing for distributed systems.