Large enterprises or organizations may maintain thousands of resources. If you use application groups to manage these resources, you must create thousands of applications groups. Manual maintenance is time-consuming and error-prone. CloudMonitor allows you to attach tags to resources, classify and manage resources based on tags, and automate resource monitoring. Tag-based monitoring helps you reduce monitoring costs.

Prerequisites

Tags are attached to resources of Alibaba Cloud services based on business needs.

Background information

When you use CloudMonitor to manage resources based on tags, take note of the following limits:
  • You can only use tags to manage Elastic Compute Service (ECS), ApsaraDB RDS, and Server Load Balancer (SLB) instances. Network interface controllers (NICs) and disks cannot be tagged.
  • An application group supports a maximum of 3,000 resources for each Alibaba Cloud service. Resources are added to an application group in a random order. If the number of resources reaches the upper limit, your resources can no longer be added to the application group.
  • You can view the monitoring charts of an application group five minutes after the application group is created.
  • The system automatically generates alerts based on alert rules five minutes after an application group is created.

Attach the cloudmonitor-group tag to resources

When you create Alibaba Cloud resources, you can attach the cloudmonitor-group tag to the resources. Then, you can manage the resources in the CloudMonitor console. CloudMonitor automatically creates an application group for this tag. You can view the monitoring charts of the application group and manage the resources.

  1. Attach the cloudmonitor-group tag when you create resources.
  2. View the application group that is automatically created for the tag in the CloudMonitor console.
    Note For the automatically created application group, the Alert Contact Group parameter is set to Default Contact Group and the Template Name parameter is set to Basic Template by default. You can modify the parameters based on your business needs.

Specify tags in the CloudMonitor console

If you have attached tags other than cloudmonitor-group to Alibaba Cloud resources, you can create application groups in the CloudMonitor console based on the tags. Then, you can manage resources in the application groups based on your needs.

  1. Log on to the CloudMonitor console.
  2. Create an application group based on tags.
    Note After you create an application group, wait 2 minutes and then view the generated application group.
    1. In the left-side navigation pane, click Application Groups.
    2. On the Application Groups tab, click Create Application Group in the upper-right corner.
    3. In the Create Application Group panel, set parameters for the application group.
      When you create an application group, set the following parameters:
      • Set the Creation Method parameter to Create Based on Tags. The system automatically generates an application group name.
      • By default, Default Contact Group is selected from the Alert Contact Group drop-down list. You can select one or more alert contact groups based on your business needs.
      • By default, Basic Template is selected from the Alert Template drop-down list. You can select one or more alert templates based on your business needs.
      • You can set the Resource Tag Key and Tag Value parameters based on your business needs.
      • Turn on Initialize Agent Installation. CloudMonitor automatically installs the CloudMonitor agent on the instances that belong to the application group.
    4. Click OK.

      On the Application Groups tab, you can select Resource Tag from the drop-down list to filter the specified resources.