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Application Real-Time Monitoring Service:Billing for Container Monitoring

Last Updated:Jun 24, 2026

Managed Service for Prometheus provides a managed Prometheus service and the Container Monitoring service. You are charged for your cluster scale and Prometheus instance usage. The Container Monitoring service is available in two editions: Basic Edition and Pro Edition.

Supported clusters for Pro Edition

  • ACK Pro

  • ACK Lingjun cluster

  • ACK Dedicated Cluster

Billing method

Only the pay-as-you-go billing method is supported. Prepaid options, such as resource plans or subscriptions, are not available.

Basic and Pro Edition differences

Item

Basic Edition

Pro Edition

Data retention period for basic container cluster metrics

7 days

90 days

Prometheus agent

Provides a non-managed collection agent that you must manage. By default, a single-replica agent consumes 3 CPU cores and 4 GB of memory from your cluster.

Provides managed collection agents with a production-grade service level agreement (SLA) of 99.95%.

Dashboard

Provides built-in basic dashboards. These dashboards are not based on Grafana and use proprietary visualization components.

Provides a rich set of built-in Grafana dashboards.

Alerting

No default alerting rules are provided.

Provides default alerting rules for various components of container services.

Data export

Supports standard open source data export capabilities, such as Remote Read and HTTP API.

Also provides Remote Write and data delivery through EventBridge.

Billable items

Charges for Container Monitoring consist of two parts: cluster scale fees and Prometheus instance fees.

Pro Edition

Billable item

Billing description

Billing method

Cluster scale fees

The service calculates OCU usage based on the number of nodes (including virtual nodes) in your container cluster. Every 10 cluster nodes equal 1 OCU.

Note

An Observability Capacity Unit (OCU) is a billing unit for Alibaba Cloud's cloud-native observability services. The service automatically calculates OCU usage based on your hourly resource consumption. The price of an OCU is USD 0.023 per unit.

Pay-as-you-go: Daily cluster scale fee = Sum of hourly OCU counts × Unit price per OCU

Note

Hourly OCU count = Maximum number of nodes during the hour / 10, rounded up to the nearest integer.

Prometheus instance fees

For more information, see Billing for Prometheus instances.

Basic Edition

Billable item

Billing description

Cluster scale fees

Free of charge

Prometheus instance fees

For more information, see Billing for Prometheus instances.

Billing cycle

Container Monitoring Pro Edition calculates cluster scale fees hourly. After 00:00 each day, Managed Service for Prometheus determines the peak number of cluster nodes for each hour of the preceding day and calculates the hourly OCU usage. Your daily cluster scale fee is the sum of these hourly OCU totals multiplied by the OCU unit price. For information about the billing cycle for a Prometheus instance, see Billing for Prometheus instances.

Unit prices

Cluster scale fees

Container Monitoring Pro Edition offers a pay-as-you-go billing method. When you activate Pro Edition for a cluster or upgrade to it, the service automatically calculates OCU usage based on the number of nodes in the cluster.

Edition

Unit price

Pro Edition

Every 10 container cluster nodes are billed as 1 OCU. A cluster with fewer than 10 nodes is also billed as 1 OCU.

OCU unit price

Billable item

Unit price (USD, Chinese mainland)

Unit price (USD, outside Chinese mainland)

OCU

0.023

0.033

Billing examples

Activation

Container Monitoring Pro Edition depends on Managed Service for Prometheus. You must first activate Managed Service for Prometheus (for billing by ingested data volume, use this activation link; for billing by reported data volume, use this activation link). After you activate Managed Service for Prometheus, you can then activate Container Monitoring Pro Edition.

To upgrade from Basic Edition to Pro Edition, see Use Container Monitoring Pro Edition.

Bills and usage

You can view your overall spending on Container Monitoring Pro Edition in the Expenses and Cost console. For more information, see View your bill.

On the Bill Details page, on the Itemized Bills tab, filter by Product Detail and select Container Monitoring Pro Edition - Pay-As-You-Go. You can then view the billable item named Observability Capacity Pricing, which has a billable item code of ocu and its corresponding unit price.