Azure Spatial Anchors - What exactly are Anchor Locate Requests (ALR) and where can you see how many are actually made?

Question

In the context of a customer project, the issue is as described in the title related to Anchor Locate Requests (ALR). The website provides the following information:
"An Anchor Locate Request, or ALR, refers to a developer API call that is utilized to locate a spatial anchor."

However, since it is not clear here when exactly such a request is made and what exactly "locate" means in this case, I have already searched the corresponding documentation (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/spatial-anchors/how-tos/create-locate-anchors-unity). However, I did not find any clarity here either.

Also in the Azure Portal under the corresponding service I could not find anything.

Therefore I hope that you can help me with the following questions:

• When, where and how often are ALRs executed?
• Is there a way to see how many ALRs have already been executed?

Please let me know if you need more information.

Many thanks in advance.

Best regards
Paulo

Answer 1

Hello @Paulo Ferreira da Silva ,
I believe the following article can help clarify your questions: Understanding the AnchorLocateCriteria class - did you came across it before?

What exactly are Anchor Locate Requests (ALR)

Anchor Locate Requests are initialized by the AnchorLocateCriteria class and they can be looking for anchors by ID (Identifiers), anchors within a desired distance away from a chosen anchor (NearAnchor) or anchors close to the device’s physical location (NearDevice).

where can you see how many are actually made | When, where and how often are ALRs executed?

That will depend on the strategy you use on your AnchorLocateCriteria object, the default is AnyStrategy that permits the system to use combinations of VisualInformation and Relationship strategies to find anchors.

Is there a way to see how many ALRs have already been executed?

One AnchorLocateCriteria object may be used per watcher at any time. You can add a counter in your app to track how many ALRs have been executed.

Another option is to use Azure Portal and check "Anchors Created" Metric at any given time:

The pricing page of Azure Spatial Anchors is also a good source of information on how to measure ALRs: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/spatial-anchors/

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