Overview

Updated in May 2025. This course now features Coursera Coach! A smarter way to learn with interactive, real-time conversations that help you test your knowledge, challenge assumptions, and deepen your understanding as you progress through the course. Master the art of securing and monitoring HashiCorp Vault while ensuring high availability for mission-critical environments. This course will equip you with the knowledge to effectively monitor Vault using telemetry, audit logs, and operational logs, ensuring you have full visibility into your system’s security and performance. You'll begin by learning how to track and interpret Vault’s telemetry, audit logs, and operational logs to detect anomalies and optimize performance. Through hands-on demos, you’ll gain practical experience in log analysis and monitoring strategies. Next, you’ll explore Vault’s security model, including best practices for secure client introductions and running Vault in Kubernetes environments. The course then dives into high availability (HA) and fault-tolerance, guiding you through configuring HA Vault clusters using various methods such as manual setups, Retry_Join, and Auto_Join. You’ll also learn how to enable and manage disaster recovery (DR) replication and promote secondary clusters when needed. Finally, you’ll explore Hardware Security Module (HSM) integration, understanding how auto-unsealing and seal wrapping enhance security and operational efficiency. This course is ideal for DevOps engineers, security professionals, and system administrators managing Vault deployments. A basic understanding of HashiCorp Vault, Kubernetes, and infrastructure security is recommended.

Syllabus

Monitor a Vault Environment

In this module, we will explore how to monitor and understand various types of logs in a Vault environment. You will gain the skills to interpret telemetry, audit, and operational logs to identify system issues and optimize performance. This section also includes practical demos to help you apply these concepts in real-time scenarios.

Employ the Vault Security Model

In this module, we will focus on securing the introduction of Vault clients and running Vault in Kubernetes. You will learn how to apply security best practices to ensure safe client integration and how to configure Vault within Kubernetes to maintain a secure operational environment.

Build Fault-Tolerant Vault Environments

In this module, we will cover strategies for building and managing fault-tolerant Vault environments. You will learn how to configure highly available clusters, implement disaster recovery (DR) replication, and promote secondary clusters. The section includes practical demos to guide you through these processes and ensure your Vault setup remains resilient.

Understand the Hardware Security Module (HSM) Integration

In this module, we will explore the integration of Hardware Security Modules (HSM) with Vault to enhance security. You will learn about the benefits of auto unsealing with HSM and how seal wrapping strengthens the Vault environment. This section also covers practical insights into configuring and utilizing HSM for secure Vault operations.