Managed Service for Prometheus instance billing and pricing - Application Real-Time Monitoring Service

Billing overview

Charges consist of two cost dimensions:

Cost dimension	Description
Data ingestion	Volume of metric data written to your instance, billed by ingestion data volume or by ingestion metric sample count.
Data retention	Cost of storing metric data in hot storage and archival storage.

You select a billing mode during instance creation. Each instance allows only one billing mode change.

Compare billing modes

The following table compares the two modes:

	By ingestion data volume	By ingestion metric sample count
Billing unit	GB of uncompressed metric data	Samples (data points)
Free ingestion quota	50 GB/month per account in the first activated region	500,000 metrics/day per instance
Free hot storage	30 days	90 or 180 days, depending on the pricing option
Hot storage extension	Not supported	Supported

Free quotas

Free quotas apply to data ingestion and hot storage. Archival storage is always billed.

Basic metrics

Basic metrics are built-in metrics from integrated Alibaba Cloud services. Ingestion is free.

Integrated service	Free hot storage period
Container services - Basic Edition	7 days
Container services - Pro Edition	90 days
Managed Service for Prometheus	90 days
Realtime Compute for Apache Flink	15 days

Custom metrics

Custom metrics are user-defined metrics sent to your instance through the remote write API. Free quotas depend on the billing mode:

Billing mode	Free ingestion quota	Free hot storage period
By ingestion data volume	50 GB/month per account in the first activated region	30 days
By ingestion metric sample count	500,000 metrics/day per instance	90 or 180 days, depending on the pricing option

Pricing

Data ingestion

By ingestion data volume

Billed by the volume of uncompressed metric data written to your instance via the remote write API.

Billing formula:

Daily ingestion fee = (Daily custom metric data written - Remaining monthly free quota) x Unit price per GB

Note

Written data is billed in 0.1 GB increments. Daily totals under 0.1 GB are billed as 0.1 GB; totals above 0.1 GB are rounded to one decimal place.

Free hot storage period (days)	Chinese mainland (USD per GB)	Outside the Chinese mainland (USD per GB)
90	0.062	0.087
180	0.093	0.13

By ingestion metric sample count

Billed by the number of samples (data points) written to your instance.

Billing formula:

Daily ingestion fee = (Daily custom metric samples / 1,000,000, rounded) x Tiered unit price

Daily samples exceeding free quota (million samples/day)	Chinese mainland (USD per million samples)	Outside the Chinese mainland (USD per million samples)
(0, 50]	0.126	0.176
(50, 150]	0.102	0.143
(150, 300]	0.087	0.121
(300, 600]	0.071	0.099
(600, 1,200]	0.055	0.077
> 1,200	0.039	0.055

Data retention

Hot storage

Hot storage keeps recent metric data queryable.

With by ingestion data volume billing, hot storage defaults to 30 days and cannot be extended.
With by ingestion metric sample count billing, hot storage is billed by stored data volume after the free period expires.

Hot storage fee: USD 0.002 per million samples stored per day

Archival storage

Archival storage retains metric data past the hot storage period.

Billing formula:

Daily archival storage fee = Daily archived uncompressed metric data (GB) x Unit price per GB

Region	Price (USD per GB per day)
Chinese mainland	0.00016
Outside the Chinese mainland	0.00022

Billing examples

These examples assume a Prometheus instance in Singapore with the following parameters:

Parameter	Value
Basic metrics: scrape jobs	1 job, 1 target, 200 metrics per target
Custom metrics: scrape jobs	1 job, 2 targets, 500 metrics per target
Size of a single sample	0.5 KB
Scraping interval	15 seconds
Hot storage retention	90 days
Archival storage retention	90 days

Note

Archival storage costs accumulate over time. The formulas below assume a total retention of 180 days (90 days hot + 90 days archival).

Example 1: By ingestion data volume

Step 1: Calculate daily ingested volume

Daily ingested volume = Scrape jobs x Targets per job x Metrics per target x (86,400 / Scraping interval) x Sample size

Basic metrics: 1 x 1 x 200 x (86,400 / 15) x 0.5 KB = 576,000 KB = 0.5 GB
Custom metrics: 1 x 2 x 500 x (86,400 / 15) x 0.5 KB = 2,880,000 KB = 2.7 GB

Step 2: Calculate monthly ingestion fee

Metric type	Calculation	Monthly fee
Basic metrics	Free (unlimited ingestion)	USD 0
Custom metrics	(2.7 GB/day x 30 days - 50 GB free quota) x USD 0.087/GB	USD 2.697
Total ingestion		USD 2.697

Step 3: Calculate monthly data retention fee (archival storage)

Archival storage fee = (0.5 + 2.7) GB/day x 90 days x USD 0.00022/GB x 30 days = USD 1.9008

Monthly total

Cost component	Amount
Data ingestion	USD 2.697
Data retention (archival storage)	USD 1.9008
Monthly total	USD 4.5978

Example 2: By ingestion metric sample count

Step 1: Calculate daily ingested samples

Daily ingested samples = Scrape jobs x Targets per job x Metrics per target x (86,400 / Scraping interval)

Basic metrics: 1 x 1 x 200 x (86,400 / 15) = 1,152,000 samples
Custom metrics: 1 x 2 x 500 x (86,400 / 15) = 5,760,000 samples

Step 2: Calculate monthly ingestion fee

Metric type	Calculation	Monthly fee
Basic metrics	Free (unlimited ingestion)	USD 0
Custom metrics	5,760,000 / 1,000,000 = 6 (rounded) x USD 0.176 x 30 days	USD 31.68
Total ingestion		USD 31.68

Step 3: Calculate monthly data retention fee

Daily retained volume:

(1,152,000 + 5,760,000 samples) x 0.5 KB x 90 days = 311,040,000 KB = 296.6 GB

Monthly retention fee: 296.6 GB x USD 0.00022/GB x 30 days = USD 1.95756

Monthly total

Cost component	Amount
Data ingestion	USD 31.68
Data retention (archival storage)	USD 1.95756
Monthly total	USD 33.63756

Activate the service

Activate the service by selecting billing by ingestion data volume or billing by ingestion metric sample count.