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Managed Service for Prometheus:Instance billing

Last Updated:Apr 21, 2025

Managed Service for Prometheus instances use a pay-as-you-go (consumption-based) billing model. You pay only for metric data ingested and retained. This topic describes the billable items, pricing, and examples of the instance billing.

Free quotas

Managed Service for Prometheus offers free metric quotas to help you explore its capabilities. No free quota is available for archival storage.

Metric type

Free quota for data ingestion

Free quota for data retention - hot storage

Basic

Unlimited

  • Container services:

    • Basic Edition: 7 days

    • Pro Edition: 90 days

  • Managed Service for Prometheus: 90 days

  • Realtime Compute for Apache Flink: 15 days

Custom

  • By remote write data size: 50 GB per month, provided at the Alibaba Cloud account level in the region where you first activate Managed Service for Prometheus

  • By metric sample count: 500,000 metrics per day, provided at the instance level

  • By remote write data size: 30 days

  • By metric sample count: 90 or 180 days, depending on the pricing options

Pricing

Data ingestion

Data ingestion fees are billed in two ways:

  • By remote write data size: based on the size of uncompressed metric data transmitted to your Managed Service for Prometheus instance using a remote write API.

    Daily metric data billed = (Daily custom metric data written - Monthly free quota left) × Unit price per GB

    Note

    Written data is billed in increments of 0.1 GB. If the daily written data is less than this amount, it will be billed as 0.1 GB. Any daily total exceeding this amount is rounded to one decimal place for billing.

  • By metric sample count: based on the number of data points (also called samples) when the metric data is transmitted to your Managed Service for Prometheus instance.

    Daily metric data billed = ((Daily custom metric data exposed - Daily free quota of 500,000)/1,000,000, rounded) × tiered rate

You can specify a billing method during instance creation, and change that of existing instances. However, it can be changed only once per instance.

By remote write data size

Free hot storage period (days)

The Chinese mainland

(USD per GB)

Outside the Chinese mainland

(USD per GB)

90

0.062

0.087

180

0.093

0.13

By metric sample count

Sample count

(million entries/day)

The Chinese mainland

(USD per GB)

Outside the Chinese mainland

(USD per GB)

(0, 50]

0.126

0.176

(50, 150]

0.102

0.143

(150, 300]

0.087

0.121

(300, 600]

0.071

0.099

(600, 1,200]

0.055

0.077

> 1,200

0.039

0.055

Data retention

Data retention fees are billed in two phases:

  • Hot storage: based on the stored metric data volume under the sample count billing model. If you choose to be billed by remote write data size, the hot storage period is the default 30 days and cannot be extended.

  • Archival storage: based on the size of archived uncompressed metric data.

    Daily archival storage fee = Daily archived uncompressed metric data, in GB/Unit price per GB

Hot storage

Once you've used up your free storage days, the charge is USD 0.002 per million data entries stored per day.

Archival storage

  • The Chinese mainland: USD 0.00016/GB

  • Outside the Chinese mainland: USD 0.00022/GB

Billing examples

A Managed Service for Prometheus instance in the Singapore region is running with the following parameters:

  • Scrape jobs:

    • Basic metrics: 1 job (1 target, 200 metrics per target)

    • Custom metrics: 1 job (2 targets, 500 metrics per target)

  • Size of a single sample: 0.5 KB

  • Scraping interval: 15 seconds

  • Retention: 90 days (hot storage) + 90 days (archival storage)

    Note

    Archival storage costs accumulate over time, with the following formulas accounting for a total retention period of 180 days.

Example 1: By remote write data size

Data ingestion fee

  • Daily ingested volume (GB, rounded to 1 decimal place) = Scrape jobs × Targets per job × Metrics collected for each target × (Seconds per day/Scraping interval) × Size of a single sample

    • Basic metrics: 1 × 1 × 200 × (86,400/15) × 0.5 KB = 576,000 KB ≈ 0.5 GB

    • Custom metrics: ⁣1 × 2 × 500 × (86,400/15) × 0.5 KB = 2,880,000 KB ≈ 2.7 GB

  • Monthly ingestion fee:

    • Basic metrics: USD 0

    • Custom metrics: (2.7 GB per day × 30 days per month − 50 GB free quota) × USD 0.087 per GB = USD 2.697

Monthly total ingestion fee = USD 0 monthly basic metric data billed + USD 2.697 monthly custom metric data billed = USD 2.697

Data retention fee

(0.5 GB daily basic metric data ingested + 2.7 GB daily custom metric data ingested) × 90 retention days × USD 0.00022 per GB × 30 days per month = USD 1.9008

Monthly cost 

USD 2.697 monthly ingestion fee + USD 1.9008 data retention fee = USD 4.5978

Example 2: By metric sample count

Data ingestion fee

  • Daily ingested data entries = Scrape jobs × Targets per job × Metrics collected for each target × (Seconds per day/Scraping interval)

    • Basic metrics: 1 × 1 × 200 × (86,400/15) = 1,152,000

    • Custom metrics: ⁣1 × 2 × 500 × (86,400/15) = 5,760,000

  • Monthly ingestion fee:

    • Basic metrics: USD 0

    • Custom metrics: (5,760,000 - 500,000 daily free quota)/1,000,000, rounded to the nearest integer × USD 0.176 × 30 days per month = USD 26.4

    Monthly total ingestion fee = USD 0 monthly basic metric data billed + USD 26.4 monthly custom metric data billed = USD 26.4

Data retention fee

  • Daily retained volume (GB, rounded to 1 decimal place): (Daily ingested basic metric data entries + Daily ingested custom metric data entries) × Size of a single sample × Retention days

    • (1,152,000 + 5,760,000) × 0.5 × 90 = 311,040,000 KB ≈ 296.6 GB

  • Monthly retention fee: 296.6 GB retained per day × USD 0.00022 per GB × 30 days per month = USD 1.95756

Monthly cost 

USD 26.4 monthly ingestion fee + USD 1.95756 data retention fee = USD 28.35756

Activation

Activate Managed Service for Prometheus billed by remote write data size or metric sample count in the console.