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Managed Service for Prometheus:Billing overview

Last Updated:Feb 28, 2025

This topic describes the billing method, billing structure, and billing cycle of Managed Service for Prometheus.

Billing method

Managed Service for Prometheus offers the pay-as-you-go billing method. Resource plans are not available.

  • Pay-as-you-go billing is based on actual usage of each billable item, with payment following usage. Free quotas are provided each month.

  • The international site does not offer savings plans. If you require assistance, please submit a ticket.

Billing structure

Managed Service for Prometheus provides a managed Prometheus service and the Container Monitoring service. The Prometheus managed service incurs Prometheus instance fees, while Container Monitoring incurs container monitoring fees. Container monitoring fees include cluster scale fees and Prometheus instance fees.

Prometheus instance fees

Prometheus instance fees cover the following billable items:

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Container monitoring fees

Managed Service for Prometheus offers ready-to-use monitoring solutions for Alibaba Cloud container services, featuring two editions: Container Monitoring Basic Edition and Pro Edition. Billing details are as follows.

Note

Only ACK Pro clusters support the activation of Container Monitoring Pro Edition. By default, other types of container clusters are limited to using Container Monitoring Basic Edition.

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Terms

Term

Description

basic metric

Managed Service for Prometheus classifies ingested metrics into two types: basic metrics and custom metrics.

The ingestion of basic metrics is free, with sources including basic metrics from Alibaba Cloud container service monitoring, basic metrics from the self-monitoring of Managed Service for Prometheus, and basic metrics from Realtime Compute for Apache Flink monitoring. For information about the specific basic metrics, see Metrics.

custom metric

Metrics not falling within the scope of basic metrics are considered custom metrics. Custom metrics will incur metric ingestion fees, which are charged either based on write volume or reporting volume depending on the billing mode.

reporting volume

When metrics are ingested into the Prometheus instance, the number of transmitted samples (also called data points) is counted. For example, the kube_node_status_allocatable_cpu_cores metric monitors the allocatable CPU cores for each node in a Kubernetes cluster. Assuming your cluster contains 3 nodes, this metric will generate 3 different time series. If each node is sampled every 15 seconds, then within one minute, the number of ingested samples would be 3 × 60/15 = 12. Thus, the reporting volume for this metric in one minute is 12 samples.

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write volume

When metrics are ingested into the Prometheus instance, the size of the transmitted data before compression is counted. For example, using the kube_node_status_allocatable_cpu_cores metric as mentioned above, if each sample is 0.5 KB in size, then the write volume for this metric in one minute would be 12 × 0.5 = 6 KB.

Billing cycle

The billing cycle for Managed Service for Prometheus is 1 day. The resource consumption of the previous day will be calculated starting from 00:00 the next day. Bills are typically generated by 08:00 on the day of deduction. Once the bill is issued, if your account balance is sufficient, the system will automatically deduct the billed amount from your account. You can view your bills in the Expenses and Costs console and check your usage in the Managed Service for Prometheus console. For more information, see Usage query.