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Alibaba Cloud bills each instance per day, so spend is attributed per instance, product and member account. Each charge says whether it is prepaid or pay-as-you-go, so CostGraph can point out steady pay-as-you-go instances that would cost less on a subscription. CostGraph reads Alibaba Cloud as FOCUS 1.2 records at a grain of day x instance x product.

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Choose how the data reaches us

CostGraph pulls it

You supply read-only credentials and we call Alibaba Cloud once a day. Nothing to run.

You push it

You send us FOCUS records over the API. Credentials never leave your infrastructure.

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Before you begin

  • In the RAM console, create a user with programmatic access and attach the AliyunBSSReadOnlyAccess policy.
  • Create an AccessKey for that user and copy the AccessKey ID and secret. Alibaba Cloud displays the secret only at creation.
  • Note whether the account is on the international site (alibabacloud.com) or the China site (aliyun.com).

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Let CostGraph pull

  1. Open Settings > Integrations and pick Alibaba Cloud.
  2. Name the connection and pick the tenant these charges belong to.
  3. Enter the values you copied. The form lists what Alibaba Cloud needs and marks the optional ones.
  4. Select Connect.
CostGraph verifies the credentials with a short fetch before saving, so a wrong value or a missing permission fails while you are still on the form.
Credentials are encrypted at rest and used only to read billing data. Revoke the AccessKey in Alibaba Cloud at any time and the connection stops; nothing else is affected.

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Push it yourself

Send the charges to CostGraph as FOCUS records instead. Push FOCUS data covers the connection id, the focus:write key, and the request shape.

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Run the exporter

Rather than build that request yourself, run our exporter. It reads Alibaba Cloud on a schedule and pushes the records for you, wherever you want to run it: a container, a Kubernetes CronJob, or a binary on a machine you already have.
Your Alibaba Cloud credential stays where you put it, and only the finished FOCUS records reach CostGraph. Run the exporter covers the three ways to run it and the variables it reads.

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What CostGraph does with it

Records land as raw billing rows, are normalised into line items, and roll up into daily cost. From there Alibaba Cloud spend appears in Cost Overview and in anomaly detection alongside every other provider.