ack-cost-exporter collects cluster billing and pricing data and exposes it as Prometheus metrics, enabling cost analysis in Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK).
How it works
Cost analysis in ACK relies on three components working together:
ack-cost-exporter collects billing data — costs, real-time prices, billing methods, discounts, coupons, and vouchers for cloud resources — and converts it into Prometheus metrics.
ack-arms-prometheus collects resource usage data from the cluster and exposes it as Prometheus metrics.
ack-arms-prometheus performs cost analysis by combining the billing data from ack-cost-exporter with the resource usage data it collects.
ack-cost-exporter consists of two sub-components:
alibaba-cloud-price-exporter: Periodically fetches instance types and prices in the cluster and converts them into Prometheus metrics. Supports public cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud scenarios, and handles subscription, pay-as-you-go, and preemptible instance billing methods.
alibaba-cloud-billing-exporter: Regularly fetches cluster bills and converts them into Prometheus metrics.
Usage notes
To enable cost analysis and configure ack-cost-exporter, see Enable cost insights.
Release notes
July 2025
| Version | Image | Release date | Changes | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| v1.0.21 | registry-vpc.{{.Region}}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alibaba-cloud-price-exporter:v0.2.9-28028c9-aliyun | 2025-07-26 | Optimization: Optimized cost-exporter to support active-standby high availability (HA). | No impact on your services. |
April 2025
| Version | Image | Release date | Changes | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| v1.0.18 | registry-vpc.{{.Region}}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alibaba-cloud-price-exporter:v0.2.7-ed1bb5f-aliyun | 2025-04-01 | New feature: Cost Insights now supports price queries for ACS instances. | No impact on your services. |
December 2023
| Version | Image | Release date | Changes | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| v1.0.15 | registry-vpc.{{.Region}}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alibaba-cloud-price-exporter:v0.2.6-a577df8-aliyun | 2023-12-15 | Optimization: Improved exception handling for elastic container instances with unregistered prices. | No impact on workloads. |
July 2023
| Version | Image | Release date | Changes | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| v1.0.14 | registry-vpc.{{.Region}}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alibaba-cloud-price-exporter:v0.2.5-d7425f5-aliyun | 2023-07-21 | New feature: Price queries for preemptible Elastic Container Instances are now supported. Bug fix: Fixed an issue where resource price metrics were not removed after Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances and Elastic Container Instances were deleted and Elastic Container Instance-based pods entered the Succeeded state. | No impact on workloads. |
June 2023
| Version | Image | Release date | Changes | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| v1.0.13 | registry-vpc.{{.Region}}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alibaba-cloud-price-exporter:v0.2.4-ae2baf5-aliyun | 2023-06-27 | Bug fix: Fixed missing cost data on the node pool dashboard. New feature: Component parameters are now customizable on the Add-ons page of the ACK console. Custom configurations are retained after component updates. | No impact on workloads. |
| v1.0.12 | registry-vpc.{{.Region}}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alibaba-cloud-price-exporter:v0.2.3-a312a32-aliyun | 2023-06-09 | Optimization: Improved node price query logic for large clusters to increase data stability. | No impact on workloads. |
March 2023
| Version | Image | Release date | Changes | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| v1.0.10 | registry-vpc.{{.Region}}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alibaba-cloud-price-exporter:v0.2.1-0378c52-aliyun | 2023-03-10 | New feature: Registered clusters are now supported. | No impact on workloads. |
November 2022
| Version | Image | Release date | Changes | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| v1.0.9 | registry-vpc.{{.Region}}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alibaba-cloud-price-exporter:v0.1.9-71eaa43-aliyun | 2022-11-25 | New feature: Authorization checks are now supported in the ACK console. Optimization: The billing-exporter container is merged into the price-exporter container. Stability improved for clusters with frequent node scaling. | Action required: Go to the Cost Insights page in the ACK console again. The console prompts you to complete authorization and update ack-cost-exporter. Historical cost analysis data from earlier versions is retained after the update. |
August 2022
| Version | Image | Release date | Changes | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| v1.0.7 |
| 2022-08-05 | New feature: Cost data collection for Elastic Container Instances and pods is now supported. Optimization: Reduced memory usage and improved processing performance for cost data. | No impact on workloads. |
May 2021
| Version | Image | Release date | Changes | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| v0.1.0 |
| 2021-05-11 | New feature: Pod cost data submission is now supported. Cost forecasts based on different sales strategies of computing resources are now supported. | No impact on workloads. |