How to Achieve Unified Multi‑Cluster Monitoring with Alibaba Cloud Prometheus and ACK One

Why Unified Multi‑Cluster Monitoring Is Needed

In the era of rapid digital transformation, hybrid‑cloud, multi‑cloud, and multi‑cluster environments are widely adopted, making distributed cloud architectures the preferred choice for business innovation and elastic scaling. The Distributed Cloud Container Platform ACK One provides a unified, enterprise‑grade cloud‑native platform for managing any region or cluster.

Monitoring numerous Kubernetes clusters across cloud and on‑premise environments is a major challenge for operations teams. Traditional monitoring solutions struggle with dynamic, highly distributed setups.

Typical Distributed‑Cloud Multi‑Cluster Scenarios

Elastic demand & cost control : Scale out to public cloud during traffic spikes (e.g., e‑commerce holidays) and shrink during low periods to save costs.

Cross‑region, multi‑location deployments : Global enterprises need rapid application rollout while complying with regional data‑sovereignty regulations.

Data protection & compliance : Backup critical data between private and public clouds, leverage geographic redundancy for disaster recovery, and meet industry‑specific storage regulations.

Disaster recovery & high availability : Deploy service replicas across regions; if one cluster fails, traffic is redirected to healthy clusters.

Monitoring Pain Points

Fragmented monitoring data : Separate data collection per cluster leads to scattered metrics and no global view.

Low operational efficiency : Operators must switch between multiple dashboards, increasing query cost and risk of missed alerts.

Inconsistent alert policies : Different thresholds per cluster cause alert storms or ignored incidents.

High upgrade and maintenance cost : Independent upgrades for each cluster increase technical debt.

Unified Monitoring Solution Overview

Alibaba Cloud Observability Monitoring (Prometheus edition) uses a global aggregation instance to provide a flexible, unified visual monitoring view, integrated into ACK One.

The solution consists of two parts:

Use ACK One to centrally manage heterogeneous clusters, abstracting away environment differences.

Deploy the Prometheus component in each registered cluster and report metrics to a cloud‑based aggregation instance, delivering a single monitoring pane.

Scenario 1 – Migrate On‑Premise or Third‑Party Cloud K8s Monitoring to the Cloud

1) Cluster registration : Register on‑premise or third‑party clusters with ACK One, achieving consistent management experience.

2) Enable monitoring : Install the Alibaba Cloud Prometheus component in the registered cluster.

3) Verify agent status in the target cluster.

4) After successful registration, the cluster appears as Running in the console.

Scenario 2 – Unified Monitoring for Cloud‑and‑On‑Premise Multi‑Cluster

1) Move monitoring to the cloud : Follow Scenario 1 to bring all cluster metrics onto Alibaba Cloud.

2) Create a fleet and aggregate views : Use ACK One Fleet to associate multiple clusters and enable the global Prometheus aggregation instance.

3) Enable fleet‑wide monitoring to obtain a single dashboard covering all clusters.

Benefits

Unified cloud‑on‑premise monitoring experience.

Global visual monitoring view via ACK One Fleet.

Simplified deployment and configuration of Prometheus components.

High performance and reliability backed by Alibaba Cloud infrastructure.

One‑stop integration with other cloud services (logging, alerting, etc.).

The solution reduces operational complexity and cost while providing a scalable, consistent monitoring platform for distributed cloud environments.