How to Master Grafana Monitoring on Alibaba Cloud: A Step‑by‑Step Guide

Introduction

As the company's business expands, the number of services and servers grows, making releases more frequent and leading to more online incidents. Comprehensive server‑to‑application monitoring and alerting are needed, and Grafana provides a perfect solution.

Why Use Grafana?

Grafana is a popular open‑source data visualization and monitoring tool that offers powerful dashboards and graphs.

Key advantages include:

Flexibility: supports many data sources and plugins.

Ease of use: intuitive UI for creating, editing, sharing dashboards.

Real‑time monitoring: tracks metrics such as application performance, network traffic, server resources.

Visualization: rich chart types like line, bar, pie.

Diversity: integrates with Prometheus, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, etc.

Overall, Grafana enables better observation and management of data, improving application performance and reliability.

Useful Grafana Features

Grafana offers many features, including:

Data visualization: charts, tables, dashboards.

Data source support: InfluxDB, Graphite, Elasticsearch, Prometheus, and more.

Flexible panel layout: customizable size, position, colors, titles.

High customizability: powerful templating language for alerts, dynamic annotations, styling.

Interactive charts: zoom, pan, hover, tooltips.

Export and sharing: export to PDF, PNG, CSV and share with teammates.

Our company has built a monitoring system that shows JVM, CPU, thread, memory, concurrent users, request latency, etc., and integrates Loki for distributed log viewing.

How to Use Grafana on Alibaba Cloud

3.1 Enable and Create Grafana Service

Order a Grafana service on Alibaba Cloud, providing workspace name and admin password. The hosted service supports single sign‑on via Alibaba Cloud account or admin login.

After creation, access the workspace management page to obtain the Grafana URL.

Visit the URL to open the Grafana homepage.

3.2 Manually Add Data Sources

Using four ECS instances as an example, we add a cloud monitoring data source. We choose the Aliyun CMS data source plugin.

3.2.1 Configure Cloud Monitoring Data Source Plugin

In Configuration → Data sources, click Add data source and select CMS Grafana Service.

Enter Aliyun UserId, AccessKeyId, AccessKey, then Save & Test.

Connection succeeds and the default data source appears.

3.2.2 Create Dashboard Panels

View the four ECS instances in cloud monitoring; all hosts are normal.

Click “+” → Create → Dashboard, then Add panel.

Example panels:

Time series: CPU utilization (metric

cpuutilzation

, namespace

acs_ecs_dashboard

).

Gauge: Disk write IOPS (metric

DiskWriteIOPS

).

Stat: TCP connection count (metric

net_tcpconnection

) with thresholds.

Bar gauge: Memory usage (metric

memory_usedutilization

) with vertical orientation.

Configure each panel’s title, metric, period, group, dimensions, etc., then Apply.

Export, edit, or delete panels as needed.

The final dashboard presents a clear, high‑quality view of ECS monitoring compared with the native cloud monitoring console.

Alibaba Cloud offers a free trial of Grafana; you can claim it from the trial center.