Compatible with the open source Prometheus ecosystem, Alibaba Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus allows you to monitor a wide variety of components and collect software metrics from mainstream open source infrastructures. Integrated with various Kubernetes monitoring capabilities, Managed Service for Prometheus provides out-of-the-box dashboards for common cloud services and fully managed Prometheus services. This topic describes the benefits of Managed Service for Prometheus.
Out-of-the-box use
You can create Prometheus instances to monitor Kubernetes clusters and other cloud resources.
You can monitor various application components and use built-in alerting features.
You can use features such as health inspection, agent upgrade, visualized configuration, and cloud service integration. Managed Service for Prometheus provides enhanced O&M and monitoring capabilities.
Cost-effectiveness
You can use various metrics to monitor Kubernetes components free of charge.
Prometheus Service provides fully managed services. You do not need to purchase additional resources. The monitoring cost is reduced and the O&M cost is almost eliminated.
Managed Service for Prometheus is integrated with Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK). You can create Prometheus instances to monitor ACK clusters. The time required to create a container monitoring system is reduced from 3 days to 10 minutes.
Compatibility with open source frameworks
Managed Service for Prometheus is compatible with the collection rules in the Prometheus.yaml file of open source Prometheus, the collection rules of ServiceMonitor, and the default collection rule that uses annotations. ServiceMonitor is suitable for the monitoring of custom Kubernetes clusters.
Managed Service for Prometheus supports custom multi-dimensional data models, HTTP API modules, and PromQL queries.
Static file configurations and dynamic discovery mechanisms facilitate the discovery, migration, and integration of monitored objects.
Unlimited data storage
Storage on the cloud has no upper limit on data volume and does not depend on on-premises capacity. Distributed storage on the cloud ensures data reliability.
You can use Global DataSource and Global View to monitor multiple Kubernetes clusters. You can perform aggregate queries across Kubernetes clusters.
High performance
Compared with open source Prometheus, Alibaba Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus uses a lighter framework and consumes fewer resources. The Prometheus agent used to monitor Kubernetes clusters requires only one process. This improves collection performance by 20 times.
The Prometheus agent is deployed on the user side. You can make use of the native collection capabilities and minimize resource usage.
The separation of collection and storage improves overall performance.
The collection component is optimized to improve the collection capability for a single replica and to reduce resource consumption.
Managed Service for Prometheus can automatically increase or decrease the number of agent replicas. Workloads are distributed across collection tasks. This addresses the scaling bottlenecks of open source Prometheus.
High availability
Dual replicas: The data collection, processing, and storage components can be scaled out by deploying multiple replicas, which ensures high availability of core data connections.
Horizontal scaling: Managed Service for Prometheus supports elastic scale-out based on the cluster size.
Data retransmission: The automatic retransmission mechanism ensures data integrity and accuracy.
Comparison between Alibaba Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus and open source Prometheus
Item | Alibaba Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus | Open source Prometheus |
Resource purchase and system construction | Resources are fully managed by Alibaba Cloud. | You must purchase additional resources and deploy systems on your own. |
O&M costs | No O&M operations are required. | Routine O&M operations are required. |
High availability | Multiple replicas can be deployed for the collection and storage components. Horizontal scaling is supported. | Only a single process is running. Horizontal scaling is not supported. |
Data access | You can integrate common cloud services, mainstream application components such as databases and middleware, and applications built in mainstream programming languages such as Java and Go. You can monitor middleware hosted on Elastic Compute Service (ECS) clusters without the need to install an agent. | To collect the data of a component, you must create an exporter for the component. |
Data storage | Cloud-based storage has unlimited storage capacity. | The storage capacity is limited. |
Data visualization | Grafana is built into the console and all kinds of common monitoring templates are available out of the box. | You must deploy Grafana and configure dashboards on your own. |
Alert management | The alert center of Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) is integrated with Managed Service for Prometheus to improve alert efficiency and accuracy. | You must install the Alertmanager plug-in on your own. |
Collection performance of a single replica (2-core CPU, 4 GB memory) | 6 million time points each time. | 1 million time points each time. |
Data query performance (0.6 billion time points) | 8 to 10 seconds. | 180 seconds. |
Security management | Managed Service for Prometheus is integrated with Alibaba Cloud security capabilities and supports the authentication feature. | Not supported. |
Other capabilities | Managed Service for Prometheus supports pre-aggregation and downsampling capabilities. | Not supported. |