Prometheus Service is a managed monitoring service that is provided by Alibaba Cloud. Prometheus Service is compatible with the open source Prometheus ecosystem. Prometheus Service provides out-of-the-box dashboards for you to monitor a wide variety of components.

Note Prometheus is an open source monitoring and alerting system. Prometheus provides features such as a multi-dimensional data model, a flexible query language called PromQL, and data visualization. For more information, see Prometheus documentation.

What is a Prometheus instance?

A Prometheus instance is a logical unit provided by Alibaba Cloud Prometheus Service to manage data collection, data storage, and data analysis. Each Prometheus instance provides the corresponding data collection configurations, time series database instance, dashboard, and alert configurations. The following table describes different types of Prometheus instances that are classified based on the monitored objects and scenarios.
Prometheus instance type Objects monitored by Prometheus Service Monitoring capabilities Scenarios
Create a Prometheus instance to monitor an ACK cluster Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) clusters and serverless Kubernetes (ASK) clusters
  • Provides integration capabilities that are native to Container Service: installation and update of Container Service Helm charts, and monitoring of the dashboards and workloads of Container Service clusters.
  • The following service discovery capabilities are enabled by default: Kubernetes service discovery, ServiceMonitor, PodMonitor, and custom service discovery based on the Prometheus.yaml file.
You need to monitor both Container Service clusters and the applications that run on the clusters.
Create a Prometheus instance to monitor a Kubernetes cluster Kubernetes clusters that are not provided by Alibaba Cloud Container Service, generally self-managed Kubernetes clusters that run on Alibaba Cloud or other cloud environments
  • Provides standard installation and update methods for Helm charts.
  • The following service discovery capabilities are enabled by default: Kubernetes pod service discovery, ServiceMonitor, PodMonitor, and custom service discovery based on the Prometheus.yaml file.
You need to monitor both self-managed Kubernetes clusters and the applications that run on the clusters.
Create a Prometheus instance for remote storage Self-managed Prometheus systems
  • Provides remote storage for Prometheus time series databases.
  • Provides Grafana dashboards to display data.
Note If you deploy a self-managed Prometheus system, you are responsible for the O&M of Prometheus servers. In this case, you must configure service discovery and data collection on your own.
You have deployed self-managed Prometheus servers and you need to improve the availability and scalability of Prometheus storage by using the remote write feature.
Create a Prometheus instance to monitor Alibaba Cloud services Alibaba Cloud services
  • Provides monitoring data for Alibaba Cloud services such as Elastic Compute Service (ECS), ApsaraDB RDS, and Server Load Balancer (SLB).
  • Provides Grafana dashboards and alerts for the cloud services.
You need to use Prometheus Service to collect, store, and display the monitoring data of Alibaba Cloud services.
Create a global aggregation instance by using Prometheus Service Alibaba Cloud or self-managed Prometheus clusters Provides Grafana dashboards and allows you to configure alerts for Alibaba Cloud or self-managed Prometheus clusters. You need to create a global aggregation instance to aggregate Alibaba Cloud or self-managed Prometheus clusters.

Benefits of Prometheus Service

Alibaba Cloud Prometheus Service provides the following monitoring capabilities: application monitoring for multiple scenarios, component monitoring for multiple layers, and metric monitoring for multiple dimensions. Prometheus Service is integrated with Grafana dashboards and Alertmanager features. Prometheus Service is fully compatible with the open source Prometheus ecosystem. Prometheus Service helps you easily build an observable platform that is comprehensive, stable, secure, highly available, and scalable.

  • Application monitoring for multiple scenarios
    Prometheus Service provides free, out-of-the-box monitoring and alerting capabilities for Kubernetes container applications, ECS clusters in VPCs, and remote storage. Prometheus Service allows you to install and deploy self-managed Kubernetes clusters for application monitoring.
  • Component monitoring for multiple layers
    Prometheus Service provides component monitoring and alerting capabilities for nearly 30 cloud services. The components may be deployed across the infrastructure layer, middle layer, and application layer. Prometheus Service allows you to install and deploy open source exporters of the Prometheus community at the middle layer. In addition, Prometheus Service allows you to monitor components at the application layer by performing a few operations in the console.
  • Metric monitoring for multiple dimensions
    Prometheus Service provides client libraries in more than 20 languages. You can use these client libraries to produce and expose metrics in the OpenMetrics format at low costs and low overheads. Prometheus Service can collect metrics in regular dimensions. Prometheus Service can also collect metrics in event and tag dimensions, and metrics that are converted by using other methods.

For more information, see Features and Benefits.