Kickstart Your Observability Journey with Alibaba Cloud Monitoring
This guide introduces new Alibaba Cloud users to the fundamentals of cloud observability, explaining the metric‑trace‑log stack, the layered monitoring pyramid, and step‑by‑step how to set up out‑of‑the‑box resource monitoring, dashboards, alerts, and advanced integration options.
In the era of cloud computing, Alibaba Cloud offers hundreds of products, making it challenging for customers to choose and use them effectively; the goal is to "use cloud well, manage cloud well."
Understanding the Layers of Observability
Observability consists of three technical stacks—metrics, traces, and logs—mapped to business layers: experience, business, application, and resource. The higher layers reflect user‑perceived issues, while lower layers provide concrete, quickly resolvable problems.
Getting Started with Alibaba Cloud Monitoring
For new users, the focus is on the Cloud Resource Monitoring module, an out‑of‑the‑box feature that automatically displays monitoring dashboards for any purchased cloud resources.
The Cloud Monitoring console includes five main modules: Cloud Resource Monitoring, Network Analysis, Visual Dashboard, Alert Service, and Event Center. Cloud Resource Monitoring shows metrics for services such as ECS, covering CPU, memory, load, network, disk, and top processes.
Beyond ECS, Cloud Monitoring aggregates data from over 100 Alibaba Cloud products, providing a unified view of all resources.
How to "See" in Cloud Monitoring
Users can visualize resource status through dashboards and receive automatic alerts when anomalies are detected.
How to "Hear" in Cloud Monitoring
Observability is a means to maintain high availability. After detecting issues, operators can take actions like scaling, restarting, or throttling. For beginners, Alibaba Cloud offers one‑click alarm setup with predefined critical metrics and thresholds, as well as a one‑click diagnostic tool for governance checks.
Alert delivery channels include phone, SMS, email, DingTalk, Enterprise WeChat, Feishu, and webhook integrations with PagerDuty, Slack, or Teams.
Advanced Options
Advanced users can create custom dashboards or pull monitoring data via APIs for integration with external systems.
Conclusion
Cloud resource monitoring is a subset of observability, which also encompasses front‑end RUM, synthetic testing, performance testing (PTS), APM, and log management. Choose solutions based on the criticality of your business workloads, and build on the basics presented here.
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