What is Terraform? - Managed Service for Prometheus - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

Managed Service for Prometheus provides Terraform resources and data sources for automating the deployment and configuration of your monitoring infrastructure. You can define Prometheus instances, exporters, and monitoring configurations in version-controlled .tf files and apply the same setup across development, staging, and production environments.

Quick start

Install Terraform on your local machine, or use Terraform in Cloud Shell.

Configure the Alibaba Cloud provider in a main.tf file:

   terraform {
     required_providers {
       alicloud = {
         source  = "aliyun/alicloud"
         version = ">= 1.0.0"
       }
     }
   }

   provider "alicloud" {
     access_key = var.access_key
     secret_key = var.secret_key
     region     = var.region
   }

Run terraform init to download the Alibaba Cloud provider.
Define your Prometheus resources in .tf files, run terraform plan to preview changes, then run terraform apply to create the resources.

For step-by-step guides, see Related operations.

Benefits

Repeatable deployments: Apply the same Prometheus configuration across multiple environments from version-controlled .tf files.
Multi-cloud consistency: Manage Alibaba Cloud resources alongside other cloud providers using the same workflow.
Automated provisioning: Create templates that provision monitoring resources predictably, reducing manual errors.
Infrastructure as code: Terraform stores a copy of the current state of your infrastructure, so you can track changes to components and share configurations with other users.
Change visibility: Preview infrastructure changes before applying them. The plan-and-apply workflow shows exactly what will be created, modified, or deleted.
Reduced development costs: Create development and deployment environments based on your requirements to evaluate costs before making changes.

Supported resources

The following Terraform resources are available for Managed Service for Prometheus, grouped by function.

Instance management

Resource	Description
alicloud_arms_prometheus	Create and manage Prometheus instances.
alicloud_arms_environment	Create and manage environment instances.

Monitoring configuration

Resource	Description
alicloud_arms_prometheus_monitoring	Configure monitoring settings for a Prometheus instance, including ServiceMonitor, PodMonitor, custom jobs, and health inspection agents.
alicloud_arms_env_service_monitor	Manage the ServiceMonitor of an environment instance.
alicloud_arms_env_pod_monitor	Manage the PodMonitor of an environment instance.
alicloud_arms_env_custom_job	Manage custom scrape jobs of an environment instance.

Integration and export

Resource	Description
alicloud_arms_integration_exporter	Manage exporters in the Integration Center.
alicloud_arms_remote_write	Manage remote write configurations of a Prometheus instance.

Add-ons and features

Resource	Description
alicloud_arms_addon_release	Manage add-on packages of an environment instance.
alicloud_arms_env_feature	Manage environment features, including metric-agent, app-agent-pilot, service-check, and ebpf-agent.

Supported data sources

Data source	Description
alicloud_arms_prometheus	List all Prometheus instances.
alicloud_arms_integration_exporters	List exporters in the Integration Center.
alicloud_arms_remote_write	List remote write configurations of a Prometheus instance.

Alibaba Cloud Terraform provider

The Alibaba Cloud Provider (terraform-provider-alicloud) connects Terraform to Alibaba Cloud APIs. It covers 163 resources and 113 data sources across 35 services, including computing, storage, networking, load balancing, CDN, middleware, access control, and database services. For a full list of providers, see Terraform Registry.

For more information about Terraform, see terraform.io. For common Terraform use cases on Alibaba Cloud, see Scenarios.