Alibaba CloudMonitor
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What is Alibaba CloudMonitor
Alibaba CloudMonitor is a monitoring and alerting service within Alibaba Cloud that collects metrics and events for cloud resources and applications. It is used by cloud operations, SRE, and DevOps teams to track availability and performance across compute, storage, networking, managed databases, and container environments running on Alibaba Cloud. The product provides dashboards, alarms, and integrations with other Alibaba Cloud services for incident response and automation. It is primarily designed for organizations operating workloads in the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem.
Native Alibaba Cloud integration
CloudMonitor is tightly integrated with Alibaba Cloud services, enabling out-of-the-box metric collection for many first-party resources without deploying third-party agents for basic infrastructure telemetry. It aligns with Alibaba Cloud identity and access controls and can be managed alongside other Alibaba Cloud operational services. This reduces setup effort for teams standardizing on Alibaba Cloud. It also supports monitoring for common Alibaba Cloud resource types (for example, compute and managed services) through built-in namespaces.
Alerting and automation hooks
The service includes threshold-based alarms and notification routing to support operational response. It can trigger actions through Alibaba Cloud tooling (for example, event-driven workflows) to support automated remediation patterns. This helps teams implement consistent alert policies across multiple resource types. It also supports multi-dimensional metrics and alarm rules that map to cloud resource tags and instances.
Dashboards for ops visibility
CloudMonitor provides dashboards and charts for tracking resource health and performance trends over time. It supports consolidating key infrastructure indicators (CPU, memory, network, and service-specific metrics) into views used by operations teams. This is useful for day-to-day monitoring and capacity planning within a single cloud environment. It can serve as a baseline observability layer when paired with other Alibaba Cloud logging and tracing services.
Best fit for Alibaba Cloud
CloudMonitor is primarily optimized for Alibaba Cloud resources, so organizations with significant multi-cloud or heterogeneous on-prem environments may need additional tooling to achieve consistent coverage. Cross-platform feature parity and unified views can be harder to maintain when mixing vendors. Teams may end up operating multiple monitoring stacks. This can increase operational overhead compared with a single vendor-neutral platform.
APM depth may vary
While CloudMonitor supports application-related monitoring capabilities, deep code-level APM features (such as broad language auto-instrumentation, advanced distributed tracing analytics, and rich dependency mapping) may require additional Alibaba Cloud services or third-party tools. This can complicate procurement and architecture for teams expecting a single consolidated APM experience. Feature availability can also depend on the specific Alibaba Cloud products in use. Buyers should validate end-to-end tracing and service-level analysis requirements during evaluation.
Data portability and lock-in
Monitoring data, dashboards, and alert configurations are designed around Alibaba Cloud constructs and APIs, which can make migration to another platform more involved. Export and integration options may not match the flexibility of dedicated observability suites that prioritize open telemetry pipelines. This can affect long-term portability of historical metrics and alert logic. Organizations with strict data residency or external SIEM/observability requirements should confirm supported export paths.
Plan & Pricing
Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go (multiple modules/features with per-unit billing).
Key pricing items (official Alibaba Cloud pages):
-
CloudMonitor Basic (pay-as-you-go):
- Alert text messages: free quota 1,000/month; excess charged at USD 0.0064 per message.
- Alert phone calls: USD 0.0212 per call.
- API calls for metric data query: free quota 1,000,000 calls/month; excess USD 0.017 per 10,000 calls.
- Dynamic threshold: USD 0.0004 per time series per hour.
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Real User Monitoring (RUM) / Sessions (pay-as-you-go by OCU):
- Monthly free quota: 100 OCU.
- Pricing examples: China (Hangzhou) region: CNY 0.15 per OCU; Singapore and US (West) regions: CNY 0.21 per OCU.
-
Network Analysis & Monitoring (site detection, multi-step detection, browser tests) — pay-as-you-go unit prices:
- Site monitoring (PC detection): China carriers: USD 1.7 per 10,000 detection requests (USD 0.00017 per request). Carriers outside China: USD 8.4 per 10,000 (USD 0.00084 per request). LastMile (China): USD 34 per 10,000 (USD 0.0034 per request). Mobile (China): USD 60 per 10,000 (USD 0.006 per request). VPC detection: USD 0.17 per 10,000 (USD 0.000017 per request).
- Browser tests: China detection points: USD 0.0015 per detection request; detection points outside China: USD 0.0075 per detection request.
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Dashboard / Hybrid Cloud Monitoring (pay-as-you-go):
- Charged based on number of data points per day and storage-duration specification. Example unit prices (for illustration in docs): USD 0.004331 per 1,000 data points for first tier (example) and USD 0.00315 per 1,000 for the next tier (docs provide formulas and example calculations). Exact price varies by chosen storage specification.
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APM / Application Monitoring (resource packages for Expert edition):
- Official resource-package examples (Agent×Hour based, pricing on Alibaba Cloud site — example Chinese-language resource-package table):
- 初級資源套件 (3,600 Agent×Hour): CNY 700 (valid period 6 months).
- 中級資源套件 (28,800 Agent×Hour): CNY 4,200 (valid period 12 months).
- 進階資源套件 (230,400 Agent×Hour): CNY 25,200 (valid period 12 months).
- (These are resource-package (prepaid) options for the APM expert edition; product pages note actual buy page prevails.)
- Official resource-package examples (Agent×Hour based, pricing on Alibaba Cloud site — example Chinese-language resource-package table):
Free tier / free plan: Unavailable — official docs show monthly free quotas for specific billable items (e.g., 100 OCU RUM free quota, 1,000 alert texts/month, 1,000,000 API calls/month) but do not describe a permanently free product plan.
Free trial: Unavailable — no official documentation found that states a time-limited free trial for CloudMonitor as a whole.
Notes & limitations:
- Pricing varies by module (Basic, RUM, Network Analysis, Dashboard, Container Monitor, APM resource packages). Many features are charged pay-as-you-go; some modules (APM expert) offer prepaid resource packages.
- All prices and examples are taken from Alibaba Cloud official documentation pages; the documentation frequently notes that "actual prices on the buy page prevail."
(Only official Alibaba Cloud pages were used.)
Seller details
Alibaba Group Holding Limited
Hangzhou, China
1999
Public
https://www.alibabagroup.com/
https://x.com/AlibabaGroup
https://www.linkedin.com/company/alibaba-group/
