Understanding usage Azure Maps

Question

I tried Azure maps and used the key in the WinUI 3 Gallery App MapsControl demo.

This is the result of just panning around and zooming in (not out).

Only 1000 to 5000 transactions are free.

So, the usage of 415. Are those 415 transactions? Does this also mean for this month it will be 415/1000 free? How does the usage and transactions work?

Answer 1

The usage reports shows the number of REST services requests to the Azure Maps services and is not the number of transactions generated. I suspect most, if not all of the usage you are seeing is tile requests. Most of the usage in your report is likely non-billable and doesn't count towards the free limit (or generate any cost). For the usage that is actually map tiles, it takes 15 requests to make a single transaction, so whatever number you see in the report for those, you can divide it by 15 to get the actual number of transactions. These will most likely show up as one of the following: MapTile.GetBaseTile, MapTile.GetImageryTile, TrafficIncident.GetTrafficIncidentTile, MapTile.GetTrafficFlowTile.

To get more insights into the report, click on the "Apply splitting" button and then under "Values" select "API name". This will let you see where the requests are coming from. When you do this you will likely see a lot of the usage is for the following:

• MapCopyright.GetDynamicTilesetAttribution - I don't believe this is billable. This just tells the map what copyright to show as you move the map around.
• MapTile.GetFreeTile - The Azure Maps road map styles leverage a second tile layer for performance reasons, and are not charged for.
• MapTile.GetTilesetDetails - non-billable backend service used by Azure Maps to get a list of all the built in map styles.
• Style.Getstyle - non-billable backend service used to get the style information for rendering the map.
• Style.GetThumbnail - non-billable backend service used to get the thumbnail icons the style control and other image assets used by the map (like logo).
• Style.GetSprite - non-billable backend service used to get the image sprite used by the map style.
• Style.GetGlyph - non-billable backend service used to get the font fills used by the map.
• At present, any other item that starts with "Style." is most likely a non-billable service.

When you take these out of the report your usage, then divide the tile usage by 15, the total transactions used is likely really small.

You likely will also see ReverseGeocode usage. I believe these are billable. These are generated by the map to power the screen reader for accessibility as you move it around in certain areas. The map actually leverages the vector tiles for the screen reader as much as it can, but if there isn't any useful visible data in the tiles, the map falls back to making a call to the reverse geocoding service. Accessibility is highly recommended, but if you want to remove these requests you can set the maps option enableAccessibilityLocationFallback to false when loading the map.

You are likely wondering why all those non-billable backend service requests are showing up in the report. I'm not on the Azure Maps team but suspect a big part of it is for transparency, monitoring, and security. If someone were to try and do a DNS attack on one of these services, the team would be able to figure out which account was being used and block requests to that service for a single account while working with the owner of that account to mitigate the issue.

I agree there is a lot to be desired with how those reports could be improved, but I believe the team is really limited in what they can provide there since this is the standardized reporting page used by all Azure services.