EIP provides the following O&M and monitoring features:
Cost optimization: Manage idle EIPs to prevent unnecessary expenses.
Resource organization: Use tags to classify resources and establish a business-oriented view of your infrastructure.
Auditing and tracking: Review operation records to trace configuration changes and troubleshoot issues.
Idle EIPs
Manage EIPs that have not been associated with cloud resources for a specified period. You can release them, associate them with active workloads, or add them to a whitelist to retain them long-term.
View idle EIPs
Go to the Idle Instance page.
Set Resource Type to EIP to view idle EIPs. By default, EIPs idle for over 7 days are displayed. You can use the Idle Period drop-down to change this threshold to 3 or 14 days.
Manage idle EIPs
From this page you can:
Release an idle EIP to stop billing.
Bind resources to put it back in use.
Add to Whitelist to keep the EIP without receiving idle notifications. This is useful for reserved IPs, disaster recovery IPs, or fixed egress IPs that must be retained even if unused.
Idle notifications
Set up alerts when EIPs stay idle beyond a threshold.
On the Idle Instance page, click Set Alert for Idle Status.
For Elastic IP Addresses, turn on the switch in the Alert for Idle Status column and set the Idle Duration (Day).
You can also configure periodic notifications to be sent every time the instance remains idle for the specified duration.
Tags
Tags are metadata key-value pairs that help you classify and group EIPs for search, cost allocation, and resource isolation.
Tag design examples.
Usage notes
Quotas: Up to 20 tags per EIP. This quota cannot be increased.
Security: Never store sensitive information (passwords, API keys) in tags — tag values may appear in billing reports.
Uniqueness: Each tag key on an EIP must be unique.
Formatting: Tag keys and values are case-sensitive. Keys cannot start with
aliyun,acs:,http://, orhttps://.Region isolation: Tags are region-scoped and cannot be shared across regions.
Binding constraints: Tags cannot exist without a resource — they must be bound to an EIP.
Modifications: Tag keys and values can be modified after creation.
Deletions: Deleting an EIP removes all its tags. Other EIPs sharing the same tag keys are not affected.
Add or remove tags
Single EIP
Go to the EIP page. In the Tags column for the target EIP, hover over the
icon and click Bind or Edit in the tooltip that appears. To delete a key-value pair, click the
icon next to it.If the Tags column isn't visible, click the
icon in the upper-right corner of the EIP list to enable it.Multiple EIPs
Select the EIPs you want to modify. In the lower-left corner of the page, choose Configure Tags>Batch Add Tags or Configure Tags>Batch Delete Tags.
Filter by tag
Click Filter by Tag above the list, and then select or enter key-value pairs to find matching EIPs.
Operation records
The operation records feature uses management events logged by ActionTrail. It logs the change history of your EIPs, allowing you to quickly identify accidental operations or anomalous behavior.
Go to the EIP page.
Click the ID of the target EIP and then select the Operation Records tab. You can click View Details for more information or further filter the records by Event Name or Time Range.
Coverage: Write operations performed by Alibaba Cloud accounts through the Alibaba Cloud console, OpenAPI, or developer tools.
Time window:
Instant query: You can directly view operation records from the last 1h, 12h, 1d, 7d, or 30d in the console, or specify a Custom time range. You can query records up to 90 days old.
Long-term compliance: To retain logs for more than 90 days to meet compliance requirements, configure an ActionTrail trail to deliver the logs to SLS or OSS.