Application groups let you combine resources from different Alibaba Cloud services and regions — servers, databases, load balancers, and storage — into a single logical unit. You can then apply alert rules and view monitoring dashboards across all resources in the group, rather than managing each service separately.
Use cases
You can add resources related to the same business — such as servers, databases, object storage, and caches — to the same application group. You can then manage alert rules and view monitoring data by application group, which simplifies management and improves monitoring efficiency.
Common ways to organize groups:
By application: Group all resources that serve the same product or service — for example, all compute, database, and storage resources for your order management system.
By environment: Separate staging and production resources into distinct groups to avoid alert noise mixing across environments.
By team: Assign groups to the teams responsible for them, so each team has a scoped monitoring view.
By region: Group resources in the same region together when latency or geography is a key operational concern.
Limitations
Each Alibaba Cloud account can create up to 5,000 application groups.
You can add up to 1,000 instances to an application group at a time, and up to 3,000 instances of a single service per group. The total number of instances across all services in a group is unlimited.
Kubernetes Synchronization Groups deprecation
The Kubernetes Synchronization Groups tab on the Application Groups page is no longer maintained and may return inaccurate data.
To monitor Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) workloads, use the Kubernetes container service monitoring feature in Cloud Monitor instead. For more information, see Overview.