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Managed Service for Grafana:Container monitoring billing

Last Updated:Jun 17, 2026

Managed Service for Prometheus provides container monitoring in two editions: Container Monitoring Basic Edition and Container Monitoring Pro Edition. Container monitoring fees include cluster scale fees and Prometheus instance fees. This topic covers the billing methods, billable items, pricing, and activation for the container monitoring service.

Supported cluster types

  • ACK Pro cluster

  • ACK Lingjun cluster

  • ACK Dedicated cluster

Billing method

Only the pay-as-you-go billing method is supported. Prepaid options such as resource plans and subscriptions are not available.

Basic Edition vs. Pro Edition

Item

Basic Edition

Pro Edition

Retention period of basic container cluster metrics

7 days

90 days

Prometheus collector

Provides an unmanaged collection agent.

Provides a managed collection agent with a production-grade SLA of 99.95%.

Dashboard

Includes basic built-in dashboards based on proprietary visualization components, not Grafana dashboards.

Includes a rich set of built-in Grafana dashboards.

Alert

No default alert rules are provided.

Provides default alert rules for various container service components.

Data export

Provides standard open-source data export capabilities such as Remote Read and HTTP API.

Provides additional capabilities including Remote Write and data delivery through EventBridge.

Billable items

Container monitoring fees consist of two parts: cluster scale fees and Prometheus instance fees.

Pro Edition

Billable item

Description

Billing method

Monitoring cluster scale fees

OCU usage is based on the number of container cluster nodes, including virtual nodes. Every 10 cluster nodes equal 1 OCU.

Note

An Observability Capacity Unit (OCU) is a billing unit for Alibaba Cloud observability services. The price of an OCU is USD 0.023 per unit.

Pay-as-you-go: Daily cluster scale fee = Total hourly OCUs × OCU unit price

Note

Hourly OCU count = CEILING(Maximum number of nodes during the hour / 10)

Prometheus instance fees

For more information, see Billing for Prometheus instances.

Basic Edition

Billable item

Description

Monitoring cluster scale fees

Free of charge

Prometheus instance fees

For more information, see Billing for Prometheus instances.

Billing cycle

The cluster scale monitoring fee for Container Monitoring Pro Edition is calculated hourly. After 00:00, Managed Service for Prometheus determines the maximum number of cluster nodes for each hour of the previous day, calculates the hourly OCU count based on the billing rules, and sums up all hourly OCU counts to obtain the total daily OCU amount. The daily container cluster scale monitoring fee equals the total OCU amount multiplied by the OCU unit price. For more information about Prometheus instance billing cycles, see Prometheus instance billing.

Pricing

Monitoring cluster scale fees

Container Monitoring Pro Edition uses pay-as-you-go billing, which starts automatically when you activate or upgrade the service for a cluster. Fees are based on the number of nodes, calculated in OCUs.

Edition

Price

Container Monitoring Pro Edition

Every 10 container cluster nodes are counted as 1 OCU. Clusters with fewer than 10 nodes are also counted as 1 OCU.

OCU pricing

Billable item

Price (USD) - Mainland China

Price (USD) - Other regions

OCU

0.023

0.033

Billing examples

Activate the service

Container Monitoring Pro Edition requires the Managed Service for Prometheus service. You must first activate Managed Service for Prometheus (billed by data write volume Activate or by reported data volume Activate), and then activate Container Monitoring Pro Edition.

To upgrade from Container Monitoring Basic Edition to Container Monitoring Pro Edition, see Use Container Monitoring Pro Edition.

View bills and usage

You can view overall spending for Container Monitoring Pro Edition in Expenses and Costs. For detailed instructions, see Query bills.

On the Billing Details page, on the Detailed Bill tab, set the Product Detail filter to Container Monitoring Pro Edition - pay-as-you-go. You can then view the billable item Observability Capacity Pricing (Billable Item Code: ocu).