Configure Traffic Manager routing methods, endpoints, and health checks.
Last verified: May 2026
Configure Traffic Manager routing methods, endpoints, and health checks.
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profileNameroutingMethoddnsConfigdnsConfig.relativeNamemonitorConfigOutput will appear here...The Azure Traffic Manager Profile Builder helps you configure Traffic Manager DNS-based load balancing profiles. Traffic Manager distributes traffic across Azure regions or external endpoints using routing methods like priority, weighted, performance, geographic, and multivalue. This tool guides you through selecting routing methods, configuring endpoints, setting health check parameters, and generating the profile definition for deployment.
Traffic Manager is DNS-based, operating at the DNS layer to direct clients to the best endpoint. Azure Front Door is a Layer 7 (HTTP) global load balancer with CDN, WAF, and SSL offload. Azure Load Balancer is Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) for distributing traffic within a region. Use Traffic Manager for DNS-level global routing and Front Door for HTTP-level global routing with advanced features.
Traffic Manager supports HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP health checks. For HTTP/HTTPS, you specify a path and expected status code. Health checks run from multiple global locations. An endpoint is marked degraded when it fails checks from a configurable number of locations.
Your team is implementing a global active-active deployment across 3 Azure regions for an API. The builder generates a performance routing profile with 3 Azure App Service endpoints. Health checks: HTTPS GET /health every 30s. TTL: 60s. Within 24 hours, the routing automatically directs each user to their nearest region. When the West US region fails its health check, traffic automatically reroutes to the next nearest healthy region within 1-2 minutes — exactly the failover behavior the team needs without paying for Front Door's premium.
The builder constructs a Traffic Manager profile JSON with profile properties (routing method, DNS TTL, monitor config) and an endpoints array with per-endpoint properties (target type, target, priority/weight/region/geo-mapping, custom headers for monitoring). It validates that the configuration is consistent (e.g., priority routing requires unique priority numbers, weighted routing requires positive weights) and outputs az network traffic-manager profile create commands and ARM template/Bicep resources.
Traffic Manager is DNS-based — it doesn't proxy traffic, only resolves a hostname to one of several endpoint IPs. This means clients cache DNS responses (typically 60s minimum, often longer), so failover takes 1-5 minutes in practice, not seconds. For sub-second failover, you need Front Door (Layer 7 proxy), not Traffic Manager.
The TTL setting on Traffic Manager profiles (default 300s) controls how long clients cache the DNS response. Lower TTL = faster failover but more DNS lookups (and more cost). 60s is the practical minimum; below that, client-side caching makes the setting moot.
Performance routing uses Microsoft's measurement of latency between the client's resolver and your endpoints — not actual end-to-end client latency. If your users use public DNS (8.8.8.8, 1.1.1.1), the routing decision is made based on Google/Cloudflare's location, not the user's. For most apps this is fine; for latency-critical apps, consider Front Door which uses anycast.
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