This topic describes the impact of overdue payments on pay-as-you-go Prometheus instances and subscription instances.

Pay-as-you-go Prometheus instances

Criteria

If your Alibaba Cloud account does not have a sufficient balance to settle your bill the same day on which the bill is generated, the bill becomes overdue.

Notifications

If your bill becomes overdue, Prometheus Service sends you an overdue payment notification by email, text message, or internal message on the same day. After you receive the notification, you must add funds to your Alibaba Cloud account to settle your overdue payments at the earliest opportunity.

Impact

If your overdue payments remain unsettled for seven days, Prometheus Service stops receiving the data samples of metrics reported by your Prometheus instances until no data is received within the specified storage duration. Then, your Prometheus instances are released. The unreceived data or released Prometheus instances cannot be recovered.
Note By default, you can store the data samples of metrics for pay-as-you-go Prometheus instances for 15 days.

Prometheus Service continues to receive the data samples of metrics reported by your Prometheus instances within seven days after you have overdue payments. If you settle the overdue payments during this period, your Prometheus instances and data are not affected.

Subscription Prometheus instances

Before expiration

Seven days before your subscription Prometheus instance expires, Prometheus Service sends you notifications by email, text message, or internal message.

After expiration

  • If you enabled auto renewal when you purchased the subscription Prometheus instance, Prometheus Service performs operations based on the balance of your Alibaba Cloud account:
    • If the balance of your account is sufficient, Prometheus Service automatically renews the Prometheus instance.
    • If auto-renewal fails because your account balance is insufficient, Prometheus Service automatically changes the billing method of the Prometheus instance to pay-as-you-go.
  • If you did not enable auto renewal when you purchased the subscription Prometheus instance, you can manually renew the Prometheus instance.

    For more information, see Manual renewal. If you do not renew the Prometheus instance, Prometheus Service automatically changes the billing method of the Prometheus instance to pay-as-you-go.

Impact on a Prometheus instance whose billing method is changed to pay-as-you-go

After the billing method of your Prometheus instance is changed to pay-as-you-go, if your Alibaba Cloud account has a sufficient balance to settle your bill, Prometheus Service receives the reported metric data as expected. Otherwise, the bill becomes overdue. If your overdue payments remain unsettled for seven days, Prometheus Service stops receiving the data samples of metrics reported by your Prometheus instance until no data is received within the specified storage duration. Then, your Prometheus instance is released. The unreceived data or released Prometheus instance cannot be recovered.

Note
  • After the billing method of a Prometheus instance is changed from subscription to pay-as-you-go, the policies of overdue payments for pay-as-you-go apply to the Prometheus instance. For information about how to handle the overdue payments of a pay-as-you-go Prometheus instance, see Pay-as-you-go Prometheus instances.
  • If the billing method of a Prometheus instance is changed from subscription to pay-as-you-go, the storage duration still takes effect. For information about how to renew a subscription Prometheus instance, see Manual renewal.
  • If you want to change the billing method of a Prometheus instance from pay-as-you-go to subscription, you need to settle the bills of the Prometheus instance first. For more information, see Change the billing method from pay-as-you-go to subscription.

Example

Assume that you purchase a Prometheus instance whose subscription duration is one month and storage duration is three months, and you do not enable auto renewal.

After the subscription duration expires, Prometheus Service automatically changes the billing method of the Prometheus instance to pay-as-you-go. The Prometheus instance starts to be billed based on the pay-as-you-go billing method on the same day when the subscription duration expires.
Note After the billing method of a Prometheus instance is changed from subscription to pay-as-you-go, the metric data reported within the subscription duration is still retained for three months.
  • If your account balance is sufficient, the bill of the current day is settled based on the pay-as-you-go billing method without affecting your business.
  • If your account balance is insufficient, the Prometheus instance has the following impact:
    • On the first day when the Prometheus instance is billed based on the pay-as-you-go billing method, overdue payments are generated. Prometheus Service sends you notifications on the same day.
    • Prometheus Service continues to receive the data samples of metrics reported by your Prometheus instances within seven days after you have overdue payments.
    • If your overdue payments remain unsettled for seven days, Prometheus Service stops receiving the data samples of metrics reported by your Prometheus instances until no data is received within the specified storage duration. Then, your Prometheus instances are released. The unreceived data or released Prometheus instances cannot be recovered.