Manage an Azure Traffic Manager profile

Traffic Manager profiles use traffic-routing methods to control the distribution of traffic to your cloud services or website endpoints. This article explains how to create and manage these profiles.

Create a Traffic Manager profile

You can create a Traffic Manager profile by using the Azure portal. After creating your profile, you can configure endpoints, monitoring, and other settings in the Azure portal. Traffic Manager supports up to 200 endpoints per profile. However, most usage scenarios require only a few of endpoints.

To create a Traffic Manager profile

  1. From a browser, sign in to the Azure portal. If you don’t already have an account, you can sign up for a free one-month trial.
  2. Click Create a resource > Networking > Traffic Manager profile > Create.
  3. In the Create Traffic Manager profile, complete as follows:
    1. In Name, provide a name for your profile. The name needs to be unique within the trafficmanager.net zone and results in the DNS name: <name>.trafficmanager.net used to access your Traffic Manager profile.
    2. In Routing method, select the Priority routing method.
    3. In Subscription, select the subscription you want to create this profile under
    4. In Resource Group, create a new resource group to place this profile under.
    5. In Resource group location, select the location of the resource group. This setting refers to the location of the resource group, and has no impact on the Traffic Manager profile that is deployed globally.
    6. Click Create.
    7. When the global deployment of your Traffic Manager profile is complete, it is listed in respective resource group as one of the resources.

Disable, enable, or delete a profile

You can disable an existing profile so that Traffic Manager does not refer user requests to the configured endpoints. When you disable a Traffic Manager profile, the profile and the information contained in the profile remain intact and can be edited in the Traffic Manager interface. Referrals resume when you re-enable the profile. When you create a Traffic Manager profile in the Azure portal, it's automatically enabled. If you decide a profile is no longer necessary, you can delete it.

To disable a profile

  1. If you are using a custom domain name, change the CNAME record on your Internet DNS server so that it no longer points to your Traffic Manager profile.
  2. Traffic stops being directed to the endpoints through the Traffic Manager profile settings.
  3. From a browser, sign in to the Azure portal.
  4. In the portal’s search bar, search for the Traffic Manager profile name that you want to modify, and then click the Traffic Manager profile in the results that the displayed.
  5. Click Overview > Disable.
  6. Confirm to disable the Traffic Manager profile.

To enable a profile

  1. From a browser, sign in to the Azure portal.
  2. In the portal’s search bar, search for the Traffic Manager profile name that you want to modify, and then click the Traffic Manager profile in the results that the displayed.
  3. Click Overview > Enable.
  4. If you are using a custom domain name, create a CNAME resource record on your Internet DNS server to point to the domain name of your Traffic Manager profile.
  5. Traffic is directed to the endpoints again.

To delete a profile

  1. Ensure that the DNS resource record on your Internet DNS server no longer uses a CNAME resource record that points to the domain name of your Traffic Manager profile.
  2. In the portal’s search bar, search for the Traffic Manager profile name that you want to modify, and then click the Traffic Manager profile in the results that the displayed.
  3. Click Overview > Delete.
  4. Confirm to delete the Traffic Manager profile.

Note

WWhen you delete a Traffic Manager profile, the associated domain name is reserved for a period of time. Other Traffic Manager profiles in the same tenant can immediately reuse the name. However, a different Azure tenant is not able to use the same profile name until the reservation expires. This feature enables you to maintain authority over the namespaces that you deploy, eliminating concerns that the name might be taken by another tenant. For more information, see Traffic Manager FAQs.

Next steps