Container Monitoring, part of Managed Service for Prometheus, is available in two editions: Basic and Pro. Both editions incur Prometheus instance fees. Pro Edition also incurs cluster scale fees based on the number of nodes in your cluster. This page covers the billing method, billable items, unit prices, and billing cycle for Container Monitoring.
Supported cluster types for Pro Edition
Pro Edition supports the following ACK cluster types:
ACK managed Pro cluster
ACK Lingjun cluster
ACK dedicated cluster
Basic Edition vs. Pro Edition
| Feature | Basic Edition | Pro Edition |
|---|---|---|
| Storage period for container cluster basic metrics | 7 days | 90 days |
| Prometheus collector | Non-managed agents. Each agent uses 3 CPU cores and 4 GB of memory by default. You manage the agents yourself. | Managed agents with a 99.95% production-grade Service-Level Agreement (SLA). |
| Dashboards | Basic dashboards built on Alibaba Cloud visualization components (non-Grafana). | Grafana dashboards. |
| Alerting | No default alert rules. | Default alert rules for each container service component. |
| Data export | Open source standard capabilities: Remote Read and HTTP API. | Standard open source capabilities plus Remote Write and EventBridge-based data delivery. |
Billing method
Only pay-as-you-go billing is available. Prepaid options such as resource plans and subscriptions are not supported.
Billable items
Container Monitoring fees consist of two parts: cluster scale fees and Prometheus instance fees.
Pro Edition
| Billable item | Description | Billing method |
|---|---|---|
| Cluster scale fees | Billed in Observability Capacity Units (OCUs). Every 10 cluster nodes (including virtual nodes) equals 1 OCU. Clusters with fewer than 10 nodes are rounded up to 1 OCU. | Pay-as-you-go. Daily charge = sum of hourly OCU counts x OCU unit price. |
| Prometheus instance fees | Billed separately. For details, see Instance billing. | - |
An Observability Capacity Unit (OCU) is a billing unit for Alibaba Cloud cloud-native observability services. OCU usage is tracked and calculated automatically based on hourly resource utilization.
How the hourly OCU count is calculated:
Take the maximum number of nodes during the hour, divide by 10, and round up to the nearest whole number.
For example, if your cluster peaks at 25 nodes during an hour, the hourly OCU count is ceil(25 / 10) = 3 OCUs.
Basic Edition
| Billable item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Cluster scale fees | Free |
| Prometheus instance fees | Billed separately. For details, see Instance billing. |
Billing cycle
Pro Edition cluster scale fees are calculated hourly and billed daily. Starting at 00:00 each day, the system:
Records the maximum number of cluster nodes for each hour of the previous day.
Calculates the hourly OCU count for each hour (max nodes / 10, rounded up).
Sums all hourly OCU counts to get the daily total.
Multiplies the daily total by the OCU unit price to produce the daily charge.
For Prometheus instance billing cycles, see Instance billing.
Unit prices
Cluster scale fees
Every 10 container cluster nodes counts as 1 OCU. If a cluster has fewer than 10 nodes, it still counts as 1 OCU.
OCU unit prices
| Region | Unit price |
|---|---|
| Chinese mainland | USD 0.023/OCU |
| Other regions | USD 0.033/OCU |
Billing example
Suppose you run a Pro Edition cluster with 45 nodes in the Chinese mainland. Assume the node count stays constant throughout the day.
| Step | Calculation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly OCU count | ceil(45 / 10) | 5 OCUs |
| Daily OCU total | 5 OCUs x 24 hours | 120 OCUs |
| Daily cluster scale fee | 120 OCUs x USD 0.023 | USD 2.76 |
This means a 45-node cluster in the Chinese mainland costs approximately USD 2.76 per day, or about USD 82.80 per month (30 days).
For more billing examples, see Billing examples.
Activate Pro Edition
Pro Edition requires Managed Service for Prometheus. To get started:
Activate Managed Service for Prometheus:
For pay-by-write-volume billing, go to the activation page.
For pay-by-reporting-volume billing, go to the activation page.
Activate Container Monitoring Pro Edition.
To upgrade from Basic Edition to Pro Edition, see Upgrade Container Monitoring (Basic) to Container Monitoring (Pro).
View your usage and bills
To review your Container Monitoring Pro Edition usage, go to the Expenses and Cost console. For a step-by-step guide, see Bill query.
