Simple Log Service:SLS monitoring methods

Monitoring method

Capabilities

Pros and cons

Use cases

Use CloudLens for SLS to monitor Simple Log Service (Recommended)

• Centrally manage eligible Projects and Logstores across your account.

• Enable log collection with one click for instance logs (important, detailed, operational) and global logs (audit, billing, error, monitoring metrics). Manage collection status centrally.

• Visual reports: Global Overview, Access Monitoring, Collection Monitoring, Operation Monitoring, Job Monitoring, Quota Monitoring, SQL Quality Monitoring, and Billing Resource Monitoring.

• Configure alerts to monitor Projects, Logtail, and consumer group usage.

• CloudLens for SLS itself is free, but the important, operational, and billing logs it generates incur charges (CloudLens for SLS).

Pros: Analyzes log entries (errors, API response time, user behavior) with visual reports. Supports business-level alerts based on log content.

Cons: Cannot monitor system resources such as CPU and memory.

• Real-time business issue detection: API error rates, transaction failures.

• User behavior analysis: logon failures, page redirection paths.

• Distributed tracing: microservice call chain anomalies.

Use CloudMonitor to monitor Simple Log Service

• Provides a limited set of CloudMonitor metrics: Project write traffic, overall QPS, raw data size, client-parsed lines, and read traffic.

• Set CloudMonitor alert rules to monitor log collection exceptions and shard usage.

• Free of charge.

Pros: Monitors basic SLS metrics with seamless Alibaba Cloud ecosystem integration.

Cons: Supports only preset metrics. Cannot analyze log text content.

• Performance monitoring: data ingestion rate, query latency.

• Infrastructure health checks: node availability.