What is Managed Service for Prometheus? - Application Real-Time Monitoring Service

Managed Service for Prometheus is a managed monitoring service that is provided by Alibaba Cloud. Managed Service for Prometheus is compatible with the open source Prometheus ecosystem. Managed Service for Prometheus provides out-of-the-box dashboards for you to monitor a wide variety of components.

Note

Prometheus is an open source monitoring and alerting system. Prometheus provides features such as a multi-dimensional data model, a flexible query language called PromQL, and data visualization. For more information, see Prometheus documentation.

What is a Prometheus instance?

A Prometheus instance is a logical unit provided by Alibaba Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus to manage data collection, data storage, and data analysis. Each Prometheus instance provides the corresponding data collection configurations, time series database instance, dashboard, and alert configurations. The following table describes different types of Prometheus instances that are classified based on the monitored objects and scenarios of Managed Service for Prometheus.

Prometheus instance type	Objects monitored by Managed Service for Prometheus	Monitoring capabilities	Scenarios
Prometheus instance for Container Service	Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) clusters and serverless Kubernetes (ASK) clusters	Provides integration capabilities that are native to Container Service: installation and update of Container Service Helm charts, and monitoring of the dashboards and workloads of Container Service clusters. The following service discovery capabilities are enabled by default: Kubernetes service discovery, ServiceMonitor, PodMonitor, and custom service discovery based on the Prometheus.yaml file.	You need to monitor both Container Service clusters and the applications that run on the clusters.
Prometheus instance for ECS	Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances	Provides a built-in Prometheus agent in a virtual private cloud (VPC) to monitor the ECS applications and components such as databases and intermediate databases in the VPC. Provides the following service discovery capabilities: ECS service discovery and custom service discovery based on the Prometheus.yaml file.	You need to use Managed Service for Prometheus to monitor ECS instances that reside in VPCs.
General-purpose Prometheus instance	Self-managed Prometheus systems, containers, cloud services, and hosts	Provides remote storage for Prometheus time series databases. Provides Grafana dashboards to display data. Note If you deploy a self-managed Prometheus system, you are responsible for the O&M of Prometheus servers. In this case, you must configure service discovery and data collection on your own.	You need to use general-purpose Prometheus instances for the remote storage of self-managed Prometheus systems, or monitor metric data about containers, cloud services, and hosts.
Prometheus instance for cloud services	Alibaba Cloud services	Provides monitoring data for Alibaba Cloud services such as ECS, ApsaraDB RDS, and Server Load Balancer (SLB). Provides Grafana dashboards and alerts for the cloud services.	You need to use Managed Service for Prometheus to collect, store, and display the monitoring data of Alibaba Cloud services.
Global aggregation instance	Alibaba Cloud or self-managed Prometheus clusters	Provides Grafana dashboards and allows you to configure alert rules for a global aggregation instance.	You need to create a global aggregation instance in Managed Service for Prometheus to aggregate Alibaba Cloud or self-managed Prometheus clusters.

Benefits of Managed Service for Prometheus

Alibaba Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus provides the following monitoring capabilities: application monitoring for multiple scenarios, component monitoring for multiple layers, and metric monitoring for multiple dimensions. Managed Service for Prometheus is integrated with Grafana dashboards and Alertmanager features. Managed Service for Prometheus is fully compatible with the open source Prometheus ecosystem. Managed Service for Prometheus helps you easily build an observability platform that is comprehensive, stable, secure, highly available, and scalable.

Application monitoring for multiple scenarios
Managed Service for Prometheus provides free, out-of-the-box monitoring and alerting capabilities for Kubernetes container applications, ECS clusters in VPCs, and remote storage. Managed Service for Prometheus allows you to install and deploy self-managed Kubernetes clusters for application monitoring.
Component monitoring for multiple layers
Managed Service for Prometheus provides component monitoring and alerting capabilities for nearly 30 cloud services. The components may be deployed across the infrastructure layer, middle layer, and application layer. Managed Service for Prometheus allows you to install and deploy open source exporters of the Prometheus community at the middle layer. In addition, Managed Service for Prometheus allows you to monitor components at the application layer by performing a few operations in the console.
Metric monitoring for multiple dimensions
Managed Service for Prometheus provides client libraries in more than 20 languages. You can use these client libraries to produce and expose metrics in the OpenMetrics format at low costs and low overheads. Managed Service for Prometheus can collect metrics based on regular dimensions. Managed Service for Prometheus can also collect metrics based on event and tag dimensions, and metrics that are converted by using other methods.

For more information, see Features and Benefits.