Well you definitely just cleared it up, thanks -- was completely wrong in my assumptions. Looks like armon from consul team has answered, that's probably a much better way to go.
I did see that the documentation was very old (notice @ top of page I linked) -- I switched to this: http://www.datastax.com/documentation/cassandra/2.0/cassandr...
Still -- I think that consul is a more generic tool than Cassandra. The cluster-management tools I see on their page seem to be java-focused, if not cassandra-focused (as in, outside of just managing the cassandra cluster, JConsole manages java apps, supposedly, not any kind of app that can make an HTTP request, which Consul seems to offer).
