Managed Service for Prometheus instances use a pay-as-you-go billing model. You are charged only for the metric data you ingest and store. This topic describes the billable items, pricing, free quotas, and billing examples.
Billing overview
Managed Service for Prometheus charges are based on two cost dimensions:
|
Cost dimension |
Description |
|
Data ingestion |
The volume of metric data written to your Prometheus instance. You can choose one of two billing modes: by ingestion data volume or by ingestion metric sample count. |
|
Data retention |
The cost of storing metric data, including hot storage for recent data and archival storage for long-term retention. |
You select a billing mode during instance creation. You can change the billing mode of an existing instance, but only once per instance.
Compare billing modes
The following table compares the two billing modes:
|
|
By ingestion data volume |
By ingestion metric sample count |
|
Billing unit |
GB of uncompressed metric data |
Number of samples (data points) |
|
Free ingestion quota |
50 GB/month per account, in the region where you first activate Managed Service for Prometheus |
500,000 metrics/day per instance |
|
Free hot storage |
30 days |
90 or 180 days, depending on the pricing option |
|
Hot storage extension |
Not supported |
Supported |
Free quotas
Managed Service for Prometheus provides free quotas for data ingestion and hot storage. No free quota is available for archival storage.
Basic metrics
Basic metrics are built-in metrics from integrated Alibaba Cloud services. Data ingestion for basic metrics is always free.
|
Integrated service |
Free hot storage period |
|
Container services - Basic Edition |
7 days |
|
Container services - Pro Edition |
90 days |
|
Managed Service for Prometheus |
90 days |
|
Realtime Compute for Apache Flink |
15 days |
Custom metrics
Custom metrics are user-defined metrics sent to your Prometheus instance through a remote write API. Free quotas for custom metrics depend on the billing mode:
|
Billing mode |
Free ingestion quota |
Free hot storage period |
|
By ingestion data volume |
50 GB per month (per Alibaba Cloud account, in the region where you first activate Managed Service for Prometheus) |
30 days |
|
By ingestion metric sample count |
500,000 metrics per day (per instance) |
90 or 180 days (depending on the pricing option selected) |
Pricing
Data ingestion
By ingestion data volume
In this mode, you are billed based on the volume of uncompressed metric data written to your Prometheus instance through a remote write API.
Billing formula:
Daily ingestion fee = (Daily custom metric data written - Remaining monthly free quota) x Unit price per GB
Written data is billed in increments of 0.1 GB. If the daily written data is less than 0.1 GB, it is billed as 0.1 GB. Any daily total exceeding 0.1 GB is rounded to one decimal place.
|
Free hot storage period (days) |
Chinese mainland (USD per GB) |
Outside the Chinese mainland (USD per GB) |
|
90 |
0.062 |
0.087 |
|
180 |
0.093 |
0.13 |
By ingestion metric sample count
In this mode, you are billed based on the number of samples (data points) written to your Prometheus instance.
Billing formula:
Daily ingestion fee = (Daily custom metric samples / 1,000,000, rounded) x Tiered unit price
|
Daily samples exceeding free quota (million samples/day) |
Chinese mainland (USD per million samples) |
Outside the Chinese mainland (USD per million samples) |
|
(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
Hot storage
Hot storage keeps recent metric data readily accessible for queries.
-
If you use the by ingestion data volume billing mode, the hot storage period defaults to 30 days and cannot be extended.
-
If you use the by ingestion metric sample count billing mode, hot storage is billed based on the stored metric data volume after the free storage period expires.
Hot storage fee: USD 0.002 per million samples stored per day
Archival storage
Archival storage retains metric data beyond the hot storage period for long-term analysis.
Billing formula:
Daily archival storage fee = Daily archived uncompressed metric data (GB) x Unit price per GB
|
Region |
Price (USD per GB per day) |
|
Chinese mainland |
0.00016 |
|
Outside the Chinese mainland |
0.00022 |
Billing examples
The following examples use a Managed Service for Prometheus instance in the Singapore region with these parameters:
|
Parameter |
Value |
|
Basic metrics: scrape jobs |
1 job, 1 target, 200 metrics per target |
|
Custom metrics: scrape jobs |
1 job, 2 targets, 500 metrics per target |
|
Size of a single sample |
0.5 KB |
|
Scraping interval |
15 seconds |
|
Hot storage retention |
90 days |
|
Archival storage retention |
90 days |
Archival storage costs accumulate over time. The formulas below account for a total retention period of 180 days (90 days hot + 90 days archival).
Example 1: By ingestion data volume
Step 1: Calculate daily ingested volume
Daily ingested volume = Scrape jobs x Targets per job x Metrics per target x (86,400 / Scraping interval) x Sample size
-
Basic metrics: 1 x 1 x 200 x (86,400 / 15) x 0.5 KB = 576,000 KB = 0.5 GB
-
Custom metrics: 1 x 2 x 500 x (86,400 / 15) x 0.5 KB = 2,880,000 KB = 2.7 GB
Step 2: Calculate monthly ingestion fee
|
Metric type |
Calculation |
Monthly fee |
|
Basic metrics |
Free (unlimited ingestion) |
USD 0 |
|
Custom metrics |
(2.7 GB/day x 30 days - 50 GB free quota) x USD 0.087/GB |
USD 2.697 |
|
Total ingestion |
USD 2.697 |
Step 3: Calculate monthly data retention fee (archival storage)
Archival storage fee = (0.5 + 2.7) GB/day x 90 days x USD 0.00022/GB x 30 days = USD 1.9008
Monthly total
|
Cost component |
Amount |
|
Data ingestion |
USD 2.697 |
|
Data retention (archival storage) |
USD 1.9008 |
|
Monthly total |
USD 4.5978 |
Example 2: By ingestion metric sample count
Step 1: Calculate daily ingested samples
Daily ingested samples = Scrape jobs x Targets per job x Metrics per target x (86,400 / Scraping interval)
-
Basic metrics: 1 x 1 x 200 x (86,400 / 15) = 1,152,000 samples
-
Custom metrics: 1 x 2 x 500 x (86,400 / 15) = 5,760,000 samples
Step 2: Calculate monthly ingestion fee
|
Metric type |
Calculation |
Monthly fee |
|
Basic metrics |
Free (unlimited ingestion) |
USD 0 |
|
Custom metrics |
5,760,000 / 1,000,000 = 6 (rounded) x USD 0.176 x 30 days |
USD 31.68 |
|
Total ingestion |
USD 31.68 |
Step 3: Calculate monthly data retention fee
Daily retained volume:
(1,152,000 + 5,760,000 samples) x 0.5 KB x 90 days = 311,040,000 KB = 296.6 GB
Monthly retention fee: 296.6 GB x USD 0.00022/GB x 30 days = USD 1.95756
Monthly total
|
Cost component |
Amount |
|
Data ingestion |
USD 31.68 |
|
Data retention (archival storage) |
USD 1.95756 |
|
Monthly total |
USD 33.63756 |
Activate the service
Activate Managed Service for Prometheus billed by ingestion data volume or ingestion metric sample count in the console.