Planning Your Traffic Manager Implementation

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You can use Azure Traffic Manager to control the distribution of user traffic to similar cloud services that are running within the same data center or in different data centers across the world. You may want to send traffic to the best data center for performance, business continuity, price, compliance, legal, or tax purposes.

Traffic Manager works by applying an intelligent policy engine to the DNS queries on your domain names. Figure 1 (below) outlines the following:

  • Conceptual traffic flow – A flow of user traffic from a conceptual point of view. For more information on the actual flow, see Traffic Manager Overview.

  • The steps to create a working Traffic Manager policy and domain – The numbers show the order that you need to follow in order to create a functional Traffic Manager policy and domain.

How to configure Traffic Manager

Figure 1

The following numbered steps below lines up with the steps in Figure 1. These steps can be done in a slightly different order once you have a firm understanding of Traffic Manager configurations and best practices.

To create a Traffic Manager profile and domain (basic high-level steps):

  1. Deploy your cloud services into your production environment. When you create a profile, you must associate it to a subscription. You can then add service endpoints in production that are part of the same subscription. If a cloud service is not in an Azure production environment or in the same subscription, it will not be available to add. For more information, see Traffic Manager best practices for cloud services, monitoring, and policies and Azure Platform. For more information about cloud services, see Cloud Services (Hosted Services).

  2. Decide the load balancing method you want to use. Three different load balancing methods are available. It’s important to understand each of these options. For information about load balancing methods, see About Traffic Manager Load Balancing Methods.

  3. Decide the monitoring configuration that you want to use. Traffic Manager monitors cloud services to ensure that they are online, regardless of the load balancing method. It will not send traffic to cloud services that are offline according to the monitoring system unless it detects that all services are offline or it cannot detect the status of any of the services contained in the policy. For more information about monitoring, see About Traffic Manager Monitoring and Traffic Manager best practices for cloud services, monitoring, and policies.

  4. Decide on a name for your Traffic Manager Domain. Consider a name for your domain with a unique prefix. The later part of the domain is fixed. For more information, see Best practices for configuring your Traffic Manager profiles and domains.

  5. Create your profile and configure settings. For this step, you’ll use the information from Steps 2, 3, and 4 in the Management Portal.

  6. Test your Traffic Manager policy. Test that your policy and domain are working as expected. For information about how to do this, see Testing Traffic Manager Settings.

  7. Point your company domain’s DNS resource record to the policy in order to make it live. For more information, see Point a Company Internet Domain to a Traffic Manager Domain.

    For example, change the DNS resource record on your servers to include the following line to point the company domain to the Traffic Manager domain as outlined in Figure 1:

    www.contoso.com IN CNAME contoso.trafficmanager.net

See Also

Concepts

Traffic Manager Overview
How Do I Configure Traffic Manager?

Other Resources

Operations for Traffic Manager - REST API Reference
Cloud Services (Hosted Services)