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Application Real-Time Monitoring Service:Managed Service for Prometheus instance billing

Last Updated:Mar 17, 2025

Managed Service for Prometheus uses a consumption-based (pay-as-you-go) billing model where you pay only for what you use. Creating instances doesn't incur any fees. Instead, you pay for the ingestion and retention of metric data that they collect.

Free quotas

Managed Service for Prometheus offers free quotas for metrics to help you explore our services:

Metric

Free quota for data ingestion

Free quota for data retention

Basic

Unlimited

Hot storage:

  • Container Monitoring:

    • Basic Edition: 7 days

    • Pro Edition: 90 days

  • Managed Service for Prometheus: 90 days

  • Realtime Compute for Apache Flink: 15 days

Custom

  • By written data volume: 50 GB per month, provided at the Alibaba Cloud account level in the region where you first activate Managed Service for Prometheus

  • By reported data volume: 500,000 metrics per day, provided at the instance level

Hot storage:

  • By written data volume: 30 days

  • By reported data volume: 90 or 180 days, depending on the pricing options

Billable items

Data ingestion

Data ingestion fees are billed by written or reported metric data volume. The method can be changed only once.

  • By written data volume: You are charged based on the size of uncompressed metric data transmitted to your Managed Service for Prometheus instances.

    Daily metric data billed = (Daily custom metric data written - Monthly free quota left) × Unit price per GB

    Note

    Written data is billed in increments of 0.1 GB. If the daily total written data is less than this amount, it will be billed as 0.1 GB. Any daily total exceeding this amount is rounded to one decimal place for billing.

  • By reported data volume: You are charged based on the number of data points (also called samples) when the metric data is transmitted to your Managed Service for Prometheus instances.

    Daily metric data billed = ((Daily custom metric data reported - Daily free quota of 500,000)/1,000,000, rounded) × tiered rate

Data retention

  • Hot storage: You are charged based on the stored reported data volume. The hot storage period cannot be extended for metrics that are billed by the written data volume.

  • Archival storage: You are charged based on the size of archived uncompressed metric data.

    Daily archival storage fee = Daily archived uncompressed metric data, in GB/Unit price per GB

Pricing

The following pricing options apply to Alibaba Cloud Public Cloud only.

Data ingestion

Written data volume

Free hot storage (days)

Chinese mainland

(USD/GB)

Outside Chinese mainland

(USD/GB)

90

0.062

0.087

180

0.093

0.13

Reported data volume

Reported data volume

(million entries/day)

Chinese mainland

(USD/GB)

Outside Chinese mainland

(USD/GB)

0 < data volume ≤ 50

0.126

0.176

50 < data volume ≤ 150

0.102

0.143

150 < data volume ≤ 300

0.087

0.121

300 < data volume ≤ 600

0.071

0.099

600 < data volume ≤ 1,200

0.055

0.077

> 1,200

0.039

0.055

Data retention

Hot storage

Once you've used up your free storage days, the charge is 0.002 USD per million data entries stored per day.

Archival storage

  • Chinese mainland: 0.00016 USD/GB

  • Outside Chinese mainland: 0.00022 USD/GB

Billing examples

A Managed Service for Prometheus instance in the Singapore region is configured as follows:

  • Scrape jobs:

    • Basic metrics: 1 job (1 target, 200 metrics/target)

    • Custom metrics: 1 job (2 targets, 500 metrics/target)

  • Size of a single sample: 0.5 KB

  • Scraping interval: 15 seconds

  • Retention: 90 days (hot storage) + 90 days (archival storage)

    Note

    Archival storage costs accumulate over time, with the following formulas accounting for a total retention period of 180 days.

Example 1: By written data volume

Data ingestion fee

  • Daily ingested volume (GB, rounded to 1 decimal place) = Scrape jobs × Targets per job × Metrics collected for each target × (Seconds per day/Scraping interval) × Size of a single sample

    • Basic metrics: 1 × 1 × 200 × (86400/15) × 0.5 KB = 576000 KB ≈ 0.5 GB

    • Custom metrics: ⁣1 × 2 × 500 × (86400/15) × 0.5 KB = 2880000 KB ≈ 2.7 GB

  • Monthly ingestion fee:

    • Basic metrics: 0 USD

    • Custom metrics: (2.7 GB per day × 30 days per month − 50 GB free quota) × 0.087 USD/GB = 2.697 USD

Monthly total ingestion fee = 0 USD monthly basic metric data billed + 2.697 USD monthly custom metric data billed = 2.697 USD

Data retention fee

(0.5 GB daily basic metric data ingested + 2.7 GB daily custom metric data ingested) × 90 retention days × 0.00022 USD/GB × 30 days per month = 1.9008 USD

Monthly cost 

2.697 USD monthly ingestion fee + 1.9008 USD data retention fee = 4.5978 USD

Example 2: By reported data volume

Data ingestion fee

  • Daily ingested entries = Scrape jobs × Targets per job × Metrics collected for each target × (Seconds per day/Scraping interval)

    • Basic metrics: 1 × 1 × 200 × (86400/15) = 1,152,000

    • Custom metrics: ⁣1 × 2 × 500 × (86400/15) = 5,760,000

  • Monthly ingestion fee:

    • Basic metrics: 0 USD

    • Custom metrics: (5,760,000 - 500,000 daily free quota)/1,000,000 × 0.176 USD × 30 days per month = 5 (rounded to the nearest integer) × 0.176 USD × 30 days per month = 26.4 USD

    Monthly total ingestion fee = 0 USD monthly basic metric data billed + 26.4 USD monthly custom metric data billed = 26.4 USD

Data retention fee

  • Daily retained volume (GB, rounded to 1 decimal place): (Daily ingested basic metric data entries + Daily ingested custom metric data entries) × Size of a single sample × Retention days

    • (1,152,000 + 5,760,000) × 0.5 × 90 = 311,040,000 KB ≈ 296.6 GB

  • Monthly retention fee: 296.6 GB retained per day × 0.00022 USD/GB × 30 days per month = 1.95756 USD

Monthly cost 

26.4 USD monthly ingestion fee + 1.95756 USD data retention fee = 28.35756 USD

Activation

Activate Managed Service for Prometheus billed by written or reported metric data volume in the console.