Problem with Azure Maps Weather API

Question

Hi there,

I would like to ask if anyone can help me with a problem with Azure API.
I used the free version of Weather API, however when I noticed that the cost graph are increasing, even after the trial version. l also know that the free version allows to call 1000 requests / hour, but I don't have any request / hour in the thousands.
How is suppost to use this service?

Best regards,
Diogo

Answer 1

Can you verify you are using the Azure Maps Weather service: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-maps/how-to-request-weather-data

I ask as there isn't a free version, just the main production version with 1,000 free transactions (requests per month). There is a query per second limit (QPS), similar idea to request per hour, but I've never heard it expressed that way for this service. The limits are documented here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-maps/azure-maps-qps-rate-limits For the weather service the limit is 50QPS which works out to 180,000 queries (requests) per hour (50 requests per second * 60 seconds per minute * 60 minutes per hour). 180,000 requests alone would cost a bit over $800. These are monitored internally by the Azure Maps team and if a customer is consistently near that leave, they can contact Azure support and request an increase to the limits at no additional cost. The limits are mainly to protect the Azure Maps services from a DDOS attack. The limits need to be set to something, and these initial limits suit the needs of about 95% of the users of Azure Maps. As for reporting, in the Azure portal you can see a chart of usage which can be filtered by service. The increment of the data points varies by the timeline you choose. For the 24 hour chart the data points are 5 minutes apart. So, in that case, you could look at the chart and see if you have spikes or sustained usage above 15K requests (50 qps * 60 seconds per minutes * 5 minutes). Note that the limits are for average usage over a period of time (I don't see this time period documented). So, if you have a single moment where your usage goes beyond the limits, you likely won't encounter any issues. If you continue to exceed the limits, maybe for 15+ seconds (guessing), then you would see 429 errors for some requests.