Pay-as-you-go and subscription instances support different features and different billable items.
Feature differences
A subscription Prometheus instance for Container Service provides the following built-in capabilities: performance monitoring suite and integration with Kubernetes events. The following features are available: cluster event collection, workload performance monitoring, ingress performance monitoring, and CoreDNS performance monitoring. You can choose whether to enable the capabilities when you purchase a subscription instance. After you enable the subscription billing method for a Prometheus instance, the dashboards of the Prometheus instance are automatically upgraded to Pro Edition. For more information, see Enable the subscription billing method. A subscription Prometheus instance for Remote Write, Prometheus instance for Flink Serverless, or Prometheus instance for ECS does not support these capabilities.
If you want to use these capabilities in a pay-as-you-go Prometheus instance for Container Service instance, you can install exporters in the console. For more information, see Built-in capabilities: performance monitoring suite and integration with Kubernetes events.
Billable item differences
If you are using the subscription method, you are charged for the capacity type and storage duration. If you are using the pay-as-you-go method, you are charged for the number of data samples reported for metrics and the storage duration of each data sample. Different pricing applies for the preceding billing methods due to billable item differences. For more information about the billable items and billing details of the pay-as-you-go and subscription billing methods, see Overview and Pay-as-you-go.
The following table describes the pricing differences between the subscription and pay-as-you-go billing methods for different capacity types in the Chinese mainland on Alibaba Cloud public cloud.
| Subscription fee | Pay-as-you-go fee | Cost reduction by subscription | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capacity | Storage duration | Total fee (USD/month) | Metric reporting fee (USD/month) | Storage fee (USD/month) | Total fee (USD/month) | - |
| Small | One month | 123.67 | 336.64 | 69.65 | 406.29 | 69.6% |
| Three months | 185.58 | 336.64 | 92.87 | 684.88 | 72.90% | |
| Six months | 278.44 | 336.64 | 204.30 | 1,102.78 | 74.75% | |
| Medium | One month | 340.35 | 940.26 | 61.91 | 1,172.43 | 70.95% |
| Three months | 510.61 | 940.26 | 309.55 | 2,101.08 | 75.69% | |
| Six months | 649.90 | 940.26 | 681.01 | 3,494.06 | 81.40% | |
| Large | One month | 680.86 | 1,876.66 | 154.78 | 2,457.06 | 76.05% |
| Three months | 990.41 | 1,876.66 | 773.88 | 4,778.71 | 82.41% | |
| Six months | 1,454.74 | 1,876.66 | 1,702.54 | 8,261.17 | 85.17% | |
| Extra large | One month | 1,547.60 | 3,401.20 | 371.46 | 4,794.18 | 67.72% |
| Three months | 2,321.48 | 3,401.20 | 1,857.31 | 10,366.12 | 77.61% | |
| Six months | 3,482.30 | 3,401.20 | 4,086.08 | 18,724.02 | 81.40% | |