Find number of messages via premium channels

Question

As per this page Webchat & Directline are considered as premium channels. I want to know the following things:

• Where can I find the number of premium messages communicated via premium channels? I know analytics section display this info, but this info is captured in appInsights. If I am not using the appsights, how will I come to know this information?
• Is the 10K messages / month for free is separate for Webchat & directline or combined?
• How is it counted? Incoming or Outgoing or both?
• Also, why using these channels cost but not others?

Answer 1

Where can I find the number of premium messages communicated via premium channels?

Good question, can't find this figure easily.

The things that I found around this is in Azure Portal, in the following part:

Cost Management + Billing > YourSubscription > Costs by service

I also had a look to my Azure account details as I am administrator of my subscription, and found another graph with the same value:

It's located here: https://account.windowsazure.com/Subscriptions

You can query the transactions history and got an Excel with the daily items. it's more details, for example one line of Premium Channel looks like this:

As you can see in the last column (sorry for the size of the capture) there is 1 line by channel by direction.

Is the 10K messages / month for free is separate for Webchat & directline or combined?

The 10K messages/month for free is the sum of all messages sent in Premium channels (combined).

How is it counted? Incoming or Outgoing or both?

Given the FAQ on pricing page (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bot-service):

What is a message?

Bots communicate with the Bot Service channels by sending Activity objects to the channel endpoint via HTTP POST, and by Activity objects being sent to the Bot’s endpoint via HTTP POST. Each of these Activity POSTs is a message.

=> Each activity in each side is counted as 1 (so it's incoming + outgoing). So when you send a message from your bot with 2 calls to PostAsync (for example 1 with text only and another one with a Carousel of attachments), it's 2 messages.

Moreover, I think that special activities like conversationUpdate may count on the total.

Also, why using these channels cost but not others?

I guess it is because those channels are maintained by Microsoft, and they provide a SLA on those channels? See here

We guarantee that 99.9% of the time the Azure Bot Service Premium Channels will successfully receive and respond to REST API calls to the Premium Channels API Endpoint.