What is alicloud-monitor-controller - Container Service for Kubernetes

The alicloud-monitor-controller component is a system component provided by Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) to integrate with Alibaba Cloud observability services, such as the Managed Service for Prometheus, Simple Log Service (SLS), and CloudMonitor. It synchronizes observability configurations—including alert rules—and manages their full lifecycle. This topic introduces the alicloud-monitor-controller component, describes how to use it, and lists its release notes.

Overview

The alicloud-monitor-controller component synchronizes observability configurations to Alibaba Cloud observability services. It provides the following features:

Alert configuration management: Provides the alert management feature in ACK. You can configure alert settings flexibly.
Rule synchronization: Synchronizes default alert configurations deployed in the cluster and alert rules defined in AckAlertRule CustomResourceDefinitions (CRDs) to Alibaba Cloud observability services—including the Managed Service for Prometheus, Simple Log Service (SLS), and CloudMonitor.
Lifecycle management: Manages alert configurations across their full lifecycle.

Important

To ensure new configurations synchronize correctly, the system prompts you to upgrade alicloud-monitor-controller to the latest version when you open the Alerts page. In addition, to standardize on the official default alert rule templates maintained by the ACK team, the system attempts to upgrade the default alert rule CustomResource (AckAlertRule) to the latest version. During this upgrade and resynchronization, if you previously used Advanced Configuration to navigate to a monitoring service and manually modified an official ACK alert rule, the system overwrites your custom changes with the official ACK alert rule template.

Usage notes

For more information about how to use alicloud-monitor-controller, see Alert management.

Release notes

February 2026

Version number	Image address	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.8.9	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.8.8-c22ff94-aliyun	2026-02-27	A new alert rule named Cluster node low-level system event anomaly is added to the default alert rule template. The AckAlertRule CR version is upgraded to v1.0.18.	This upgrade adds new alert rules to existing enabled rule sets and inherits notification recipient groups from existing rule set configurations. If you previously used Advanced Configuration to navigate to a monitoring service and manually modified an official ACK alert rule, the system overwrites your custom changes with the official ACK alert rule template.

July 2025

Version number	Image address	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v1.8.8	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.8.8-c22ff94-aliyun	2025-07-25	You can configure CloudMonitor-based alert rules using CustomResources (CRs) for more flexible monitoring and alerting. ACK dedicated clusters support security hardening using the ECS instance metadata hardened mode. During authentication, the system accesses ECS instance metadata in hardened mode to improve cluster security. For more information, see Enforce hardened mode when accessing ECS instance metadata.	This upgrade will not affect your business.

December 2023

Version number	Image address	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v1.8.5	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.8.5-88ba904-aliyun	2023-12-25	ACK One and registered clusters are automatically configured, and default alert rules are created in different network environments.	No impact on workloads.

December 2023

Version number	Image address	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v1.8.5	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.8.5-88ba904-aliyun	2023-12-25	ACK One and registered clusters are automatically configured, and default alert rules are created in different network environments.	No impact on workloads.

August 2023

Version number	Image address	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v1.8.4	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.8.4-d2d72d6-aliyun	2023-08-14	Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) permissions are limited. Default alert rules can be configured for ACK One and registered clusters.	This upgrade will not affect business operations.

July 2023

Version number	Image address	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v1.8.3	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.8.3-d2d72d6-aliyun	2023-07-25	Nodes that use the ARM architecture can be deployed. Alert rules in Simple Log Service (SLS) are localized. You can choose a language for your alert notifications. The system automatically selects a language based on your site.	No impact on workloads.

February 2023

Version number	Image address	Change Time	Changes	Impact
v1.8.0-7c28347-aliyun	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.8.0-7c28347-aliyun	2023-02-24	Notification methods—including DingTalk, WeCom, and Lark—are supported by the ACK alert center. Default alert rules for audit logs are supported.	No impact on workloads.

July 2022

Version number	Registry Address	Last Modified	Changes	Impact
v1.6.5-2c5c836-aliyun	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.6.5-2c5c836-aliyun	2022-07-07	Alibaba Cloud internal networks are supported. Vulnerabilities in the component image are patched. The issue that alert rules fail to synchronize due to network issues is fixed. The logic for synchronizing alert rules in Managed Service for Prometheus is fixed.	No impact on workloads.

April 2022

Version number	Image address	Change Time	What’s Changed	Impact
v1.6.1-aa20856-aliyun	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.6.1-aa20856-aliyun	2022-04-15	Default alert rules in Managed Service for Prometheus are supported, such as alert rules for key cluster components and workloads. The default alert rule that is used to alert OS kernel crashes on cluster nodes is supported. Cluster environments without Internet access are supported.	This upgrade will not impact your services.

March 2022

Version number	Image address	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v1.5.15-ed0a4c72-aliyun	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.5.15-ed0a4c72-aliyun	2022-03-02	The issue that alert rules cannot be synchronized in certain situations is fixed. Vulnerabilities in the component image are patched.	No impact on workloads.

November 2021

Version number	Image address	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v1.5.13-6990db0e-aliyun	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.5.13-6990db0e-aliyun	2021-11-04	Default alert rules for basic cluster resources are supported by the ACK alert center.	No impact on workloads.

August 2021

Version number	Image address	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v1.5.12-f7aedb4a-aliyun	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.5.12-f7aedb4a-aliyun	2021-08-23	The alerting configurations are optimized.	No impact on workloads.
v1.5.10-a75e4ee2-aliyun	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.5.10-a75e4ee2-aliyun	2021-08-19	The alerting configurations are optimized.	This upgrade will not disrupt business operations.

April 2021

Version number	Image address	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v1.5.7-e1d5de8a-aliyun	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.5.7-e1d5de8a-aliyun	2021-04-23	Event alerting is supported. Alerts can be configured based on events using CustomResourceDefinitions (CRDs).	No impact on workloads.

July 2020

Version number	Image address	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v1.4.0-49ff2362-aliyun	registry.{REGION}.aliyuncs.com/acs/alicloud-monitor-controller:v1.4.0-49ff2362-aliyun	2020-07-24	Metric collection is supported in a cluster where both Windows node pools and Linux node pools are deployed. You can adjust the elastic sensitivity to one of four levels: 15 s, 20 s, 30 s, or 60 s. The issue that Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) is triggered during rolling updates of applications is fixed.	This upgrade will not affect business operations.

Diagnostics

No application group appears in CloudMonitor

Perform the following checks:

Check whether the pod where alicloud-monitor-controller is deployed runs normally in the kube-system namespace.
You can check the widget version. If the version differs from the latest version, we recommend that you upgrade it.
Check the log file of alicloud-monitor-controller for connection timeout errors and SDK errors.

No data appears in the application group in CloudMonitor

Perform the following checks:

Check whether the instance name in the application group matches the pod name of the application.

If an instance name is abnormal, follow the method for Cloud Monitor without application groups as described above.
If the instance name matches the pod name, check whether the pod where the metrics-server component is deployed runs normally. Check whether log data is collected normally. If the Successful write 164190 bytes metrics to monitor server message appears in the log, log data is collected normally.