She was part of a larger Romanian order which included three small gunboats and the brig Mircea.

She was powered by a 100 hp steam engine which gave her a top speed of 9 knots and carried 12 tons of coal.

[2] Alexandru cel Bun served mainly as a sea-going warship, but she also laid mines to protect the inland approaches to the Danube Delta.

On 22 September 1917, Romania achieved its greatest naval success of the war, when the Austro-Hungarian river monitor SMS Inn struck a Romanian mine and sank near Brăila.

[3][4][5][6] Alexandru cel Bun was scrapped in the mid-1930s, a few years prior to the launching of the much larger, much more powerful, modern and Romanian-built minelayer-escort Amiral Murgescu.