Traffic routing methods ​

Azure Traffic Manager supports six traffic-routing methods to determine how to route network traffic to the various service endpoints. For any profile, Traffic Manager applies the traffic-routing method associated to it to each DNS query it receives. The traffic-routing method determines which endpoint is returned in the DNS response.

The following traffic routing methods are available in Traffic Manager:

Priority routing method ​

Priority

• Select this routing method when you want to have a primary service endpoint for all traffic.
• You can provide multiple backup endpoints in case the primary or one of the backup endpoints is unavailable.

Weighted routing method ​

Weighted

• Select this routing method when you want to distribute traffic across a set of endpoints based on their weight.
• Set the weight the same to distribute evenly across all endpoints.

Performance routing method ​

Performance

• Select the routing method when you have endpoints in different geographic locations, and you want end users to use the "closest" endpoint for the lowest network latency.

Geographic routing method ​

Geographic

• Select this routing method to direct users to specific endpoints (Azure, External, or Nested) based on where their DNS queries originate from geographically.
• With this routing method, it enables you to be compliant with scenarios such as data sovereignty mandates, localization of content & user experience and measuring traffic from different regions.

MultiValue routing method ​

MultiValue

• Select this routing method for Traffic Manager profiles that can only have IPv4/IPv6 addresses as endpoints.
• When a query is received for this profile, all healthy endpoints are returned.

Subnet routing method ​

Subnet

• Select this routing method to map sets of end-user IP address ranges to a specific endpoint.
• When a request is received, the endpoint returned will be the one mapped for that request’s source IP address.