Cloud Monitor:Features

Category

Feature

Description

References

Application group

Application group management

The application group feature allows you to add resources, such as servers, databases, load balancers, and storage, from different services and regions to the same application group. This allows you to manage resources based on your business requirements. For example, you can manage alert rules and view monitoring data by application group. This significantly improves the O&M efficiency.

Cloud service monitoring

Cloud service monitoring dashboards

You can view the monitoring charts of each cloud service.

Host monitoring

Host monitoring

CloudMonitor provides the host monitoring feature, which allows you to monitor hosts by installing the CloudMonitor agent on the hosts. The host monitoring feature allows you to monitor the Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances of Alibaba Cloud. You can also use the host monitoring feature to monitor virtual machines (VMs) or physical machines from another vendor.

ACK cluster monitoring

ACK cluster monitoring

CloudMonitor automatically collects the metrics of all the Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) clusters that belong to your Alibaba Cloud account. ACK clusters that are deployed across multiple regions can be managed in the CloudMonitor console.

Dashboard

Custom dashboards

You can use a custom dashboard to create charts and views that meet your business requirements.

Network monitoring dashboards

You can view the monitoring data of the public IP address of an ECS instance and the elastic IP address (EIP) associated with the ECS instance. By default, CloudMonitor provides the monitoring dashboards of Internet outbound bandwidth, Internet inbound bandwidth, and Internet outbound bandwidth usage.

Alert service

Alert rule configuration

You can create alert rules to monitor the usage and status of cloud resources. If resource metrics meet specific alert conditions, alerts are triggered and CloudMonitor sends alert notifications. This way, you can identify and handle exceptions at the earliest opportunity.

Alert history

You can view historical alerts by cloud service, application group, alert level, and alert contact group.

Alert templates

You can save the alert rules on the metrics of various cloud services as a template. Then, you can apply the alert template to the application group to quickly configure alert rules for the application group.

Proactive alerting

The proactive alerting feature allows you to quickly create an alert system for cloud services to monitor key metrics and handle exceptions at the earliest opportunity.

Alert contacts

To send alert notifications to a specific group of contacts, you can create an alert contact group and add alert contacts to the alert contact group.

Alert blacklists

You can configure a blacklist policy to block alert notifications for a specified cloud service. To block alert notifications when the value of a metric that belongs to a cloud service reaches the threshold that you specify, add the metric to a blacklist policy.

Resource usage

Resource usage

You can view the resource usage of Network Analysis and Monitoring, CloudMonitor Basic, and Hybrid Cloud Monitoring in the current Alibaba Cloud account. You can activate or deactivate a pay-as-you-go service. You can also purchase resource plans for CloudMonitor Basic and Network Analysis and Monitoring.

Billing of basic capabilities

Pay-as-you-go

If the pay-as-you-go billing method is used, you are charged based on the actual resource usage. If you have activated CloudMonitor Basic (pay-as-you-go) and the actual resource usage exceeds the free quotas, the related items are billed based on the pay-as-you-go billing method.

Resource plans

After you activate CloudMonitor Basic (pay-as-you-go) and purchase resource plans, the resource plans are used to offset the fees of CloudMonitor Basic (pay-as-you-go) if the free resource quotas are used up.

Category

Feature

Description

References

System preset dashboard

System preset dashboard

You can create a dashboard to view the monitoring chart of a specific metric.

High precision monitoring

High precision monitoring

Hybrid Cloud Monitoring provides the high precision monitoring feature. This feature applies to scenarios where high-precision metric data is required for a cloud service.

Resource usage report

Resource usage report

You can use a resource usage report to check resource usage, estimate usage trends, and analyze resource costs. If the resource usage is high, you can upgrade resources to improve performance. If the resource usage is low, you can downgrade or release resources to reduce costs.

Cloud monitoring exporter

Cloud monitoring exporter

CloudMonitor provides the cloud monitoring exporter feature to help you export monitoring data in the cloud.

Billing of basic capabilities

Pay-as-you-go

You are charged for Hybrid Cloud Monitoring by using the pay-as-you-go billing method. You are not charged for activating Hybrid Cloud Monitoring. You are charged based on the actual resource usage.

• Billing of the dashboard feature
• Billing of the resource usage report feature
• Billing of the high precision monitoring feature
• Billing of the cloud monitoring exporter feature

Category

Feature

Description

References

CloudLens for Hologres

Data import management

After CloudLens for Hologres is enabled, CloudLens for Hologres displays all the Hologres instances that meet the specified conditions within your Alibaba Cloud account. Click the desired Hologres instance. You are redirected to the Hologres console. You can view the details of the Hologres instance and perform operations such as logging on to the Hologres instance.

Query and analysis

Select the ID of the Hologres instance and select the corresponding Logstore log. You can view the corresponding raw logs, statistical charts, log clustering, field analysis, and perform query and analysis operations.

Report center

The SQL Audit Overview dashboard analyzes audit logs and displays metrics such as the number of users, the number of audit logs, the number of clients, and the trend of log quantity.

Category

Feature

Description

References

Site monitoring

Site monitoring

The site monitoring feature allows you to test and monitor access to your site or IP address from networks of different carriers. The system sends detection requests that simulate real user access from detection points around the globe. You can view and analyze end-to-end monitoring data in the console.

Synthetic tests

Synthetic tests

The synthetic test feature allows you to monitor the availability and network connectivity of requests sent from networks of different carriers to your site or IP address in real time. You can initiate synthetic tests by using HTTP, PING, DNS, MTR, and TRACE protocols.

Browser tests

Browser tests

The browser test feature allows you to obtain the request and response data of accessing detection targets based on real browsers in different regions and network environments. This way, you can learn about the quality of user networks accessing detection targets in different environments.

Network Quality Analyzer

Network Quality Analyzer

The provided SDKs are integrated into user applications or SDKs. You can use the detection policies configured in the cloud to obtain rich and visualized business-related network data. You can define and locate network faults, optimize network quality, and link with other cloud services based on business scenarios.

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Billing of basic capabilities

Pay-as-you-go

If the pay-as-you-go billing method is used, you are charged based on the actual resource usage. After you activate Network Analysis and Monitoring, you are charged by using the pay-as-you-go billing method based on the number of carrier detection points that you use.

Subscription

After you activate Network Analysis and Monitoring and purchase resource plans of detection requests, the quotas in the resource plans are used to offset fees first. After the quotas in the resource plans are used up, you are charged based on the pay-as-you-go billing method.

Category

Feature

Description

References

Integration center

Integration of ACK clusters

Comprehensively monitors ACK clusters and workloads.

Custom integration

Allows you to add custom service discovery configurations, collect custom data, and view data about metrics, dashboards, and alerts.

Integration of Alibaba Cloud services

Provides Hybrid Cloud Monitoring integrations and self-monitoring integrations to monitor the data of integrated cloud services, including metrics, dashboards, and alerts.

Integration of components

Supports the quick installation and configuration of various components and provides dedicated out-of-the-box dashboards.

Global configuration

Global aggregation instance

Provides a global aggregation instance in each region to aggregate all Prometheus instances in the region. Global aggregation instances support unified metric query and alerting.

Alert management

Prometheus alert rule

Allows you to create alert rules for a Prometheus instance. When the specified condition in an alert rule is met, an alert event is generated. If you want to receive alert notifications, you can configure a notification policy. Alerts are generated based on the notification policy, and alert notifications can be sent by text message, email, phone call, DingTalk chatbot, WeCom chatbot, or webhook.

Prometheus alert rule template

Allows you to create the same alert rule for Prometheus instances in different regions.

Data delivery

Data delivery task

Allows you to remotely write data from one Prometheus instance to another Prometheus instance, and transfer data among various cloud service, such as Kafka and MaxCompute.

Billing of basic capabilities

Pay-as-you-go

Managed Service for Prometheus supports the following pay-as-you-go billing modes: pay-by-metric-entry and pay-by-observable-data.

Subscription

Savings plans are supported. A savings plan provides savings over pay-as-you-go rates in exchange for a commitment to use a consistent amount of resources for a specific period of time.

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Category

Feature

Description

References

Stress testing scenarios

PTS-based stress testing

PTS-based stress testing is widely used for applications such as web applications and mini programs that communicate by using HTTP or HTTPS. PTS-based stress testing is applicable in various industries, such as e-commerce, Internet of vehicles (IoV), multimedia, finance and insurance, logistics and express delivery, advertising and marketing, and social networking. PTS-based stress testing can simulate real business scenarios that involve a large number of users and provides a comprehensive method to verify the website performance, capacity, and stability.

JMeter stress testing

JMeter is an open source performance testing tool developed by Apache. JMeter supports features such as parameterization and assertion. With its extensive open-source ecosystem, Apache JMeter provides a wide range of protocol and controller extensions, along with the ability to write custom scripts for parameter handling. On PTS, you can directly use JMeter for performance testing. Seamless resource expansion and integration with cloud monitoring enhance the capabilities of JMeter in simulating high concurrency and identifying bottlenecks and issues.

Stress testing based on access logs

You can replay historical traffic based on gateway access logs with simple configurations in the PTS console.

Multi-protocol stress testing

You can perform stress testing for microservices applications deployed in virtual private clouds (VPCs), such as Dubbo, Spring Cloud, and gRPC applications. Stress testing scenarios such as Microservices Engine (MSE) and cloud-native API Gateway are supported.

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Import of scrips to scenarios

PTS allows you to import JMeter (JMX), Postman (JSON), HTTP Archive (.har), YAML (.yml), and Swagger (.json) scripts to scenarios and convert the scripts into PTS-native formats for performance testing. PTS provides the requests per second (RPS) performance testing mode, allows real-time adjustment of the testing parameters, and can track the performance metrics of individual APIs.

SLA management

SLA management

Service-level agreement (SLA) is an important basis for determining whether a stress testing task is abnormal. During the stress testing, you can check the status of your stress testing workloads by viewing the SLA metrics of core services.

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Recording of stress testing scenarios

Use a PTS Chrome plug-in to record stress testing scenarios

By installing a plug-in on the Chrome browser, you can easily record the operation links and business interfaces in the browser. You can simulate the operations of stress testing scenarios on a PC by using the Chrome browser. The plug-in records the URL of the stress testing request, including the header and body information. You can create a stress testing scenario by using the content recorded by the plug-in.

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Use Charles to record stress testing scenarios

Charles is a commonly used network packet interception tool. You can use Charles to configure recording information and complete cloud recording.

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Use JMeter to record stress testing scripts

JMeter is an open source performance testing tool developed by Apache. JMeter supports features such as parameterization and assertion. With its extensive open-source ecosystem, Apache JMeter provides a wide range of protocol and controller extensions.

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API stress test

API stress test

PTS allows you to quickly debug and perform stress testing on HTTP APIs in the console.

System management

Access control

You can use Resource Access Management (RAM) to grant different permissions to different RAM users. This way, you can prevent security risks caused by the exposure of the AccessKey pair of your Alibaba Cloud account.

Recipient management

When you use features such as SLA management and scheduled stress testing, you need to send notifications to specific personnel.

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Analysis and observability of stress testing reports

Cloud resource performance analysis

In the performance testing process, it is often necessary to observe whether the metric values are normal in real time. In addition to powerful client metrics, PTS provides metrics for application servers, databases, middleware, and network portals. Monitoring is the process of finding system bottlenecks. Monitoring data is an important foundation for performance baseline management, capacity planning, and high-availability architecture.

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Analysis of PTS-based stress testing reports

After the stress testing is completed, the system automatically obtains the stress testing data and generates a stress testing report. The stress testing data includes the stress testing scenario metrics, business details, monitoring details, and API sampling logs. You can view and export the stress testing report.

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Analysis of JMeter stress testing reports

After you complete a JMeter stress test, the system automatically obtains the stress testing data and generates a stress testing report.

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Export of stress testing data to Managed Service for Prometheus

For PTS-based stress testing and JMeter stress testing that are initiated after January 4, 2023, the default stress testing metrics are written to Alibaba Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus. PTS provides some built-in Grafana dashboards. You can customize Grafana dashboards based on the stress testing metrics of PTS.

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Billing of basic capabilities

Pay-as-you-go

The pay-as-you-go billing method is based on stress testing tasks. You are charged based on the Virtual User Minutes (VUM) consumption in a stress testing task that is complete.

Resource plans

Resource plans can be used to offset the fees of stress testing tasks. Fees are offset based on the VUM consumption in a stress testing task that is complete.

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Category

Feature

Description

References

Workspace management

Workspace information management

You can view or modify the basic information and connection information about a Grafana workspace on the Workspace information page. You can also integrate a cloud service with the Grafana workspace on this page.

Cloud service integration

You can integrate data sources and dashboards of Alibaba Cloud services with your Grafana workspaces and synchronize data to the workspaces with a few clicks.

Account management

You can change the password of the Admin account for the current Grafana workspace and manage the permissions of authorized users on the Account Management page.

• Authorize an Alibaba Cloud account
• Manage accounts

Performance monitoring

You can monitor the performance of Grafana workspaces in real time. This way, you can handle exceptions at the earliest opportunity to ensure the availability of Grafana workspaces.

• View performance monitoring data
• Upgrade workspace configurations

Alert management

The Alert Management module of Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) is an out-of-the-box intelligent alerting service that can receive alert information from various clients such as Managed Service for Prometheus clients. The alert events are sent to different alert contacts based on tags after automatic deduplication, grouping, and algorithm-based noise reduction. This helps the O&M team reduce project risks.

Parameter settings

Managed Service for Grafana provides a variety of parameters. You can modify the parameters such as environment variables in the .ini configuration file.

Data security

If you need to access a Grafana workspace over the Internet or a private network, you can add the IP addresses of your devices to the IP address whitelist of the Grafana workspace.

• Configure a public IP address whitelist
• Configure a private domain name and an IP address whitelist

Data migration

You can migrate self-managed Grafana to Managed Service for Grafana workspaces for centralized management.

Domain name management

You can resolve a specific domain name to a Grafana workspace. This meets your personal requirement or enterprise requirement for unified domain names.

• Customize the prefix of a public domain name
• Configure a custom public domain

Data report

You can obtain a data report by exporting a specific dashboard. You can also send the data of a specific dashboard to the specified email address at the specified time.

Data backup

You can back up the data of a Grafana workspace, including the dashboards, data sources, organizations, and authorized accounts.

VPC data channel management

You can establish data channels between Managed Service for Grafana and VPCs. This way, you can access VPC-connected data sources that are inaccessible over the Internet from Grafana workspaces.

Billing

Pay-as-you-go

You are charged for Container Monitoring Pro Edition based on the number of nodes in the ACK cluster that is monitored.

Subscription

Managed Service for Grafana provides three editions: Shared Edition (free of charge), Pro Edition, and Advanced Edition.