I would like to know if the user agent that Traffic Manager sends as part of it's probing for cloud service endpoints is guaranteed to NOT change. Details for this are explained next.
I use the IIS URL Rewrite module and its rules to ensure canonical URLs and redirect the client to the canonical URL if the incoming request is not to the desired canonical URL. For example, if my site is example.cloudapp.net and my domain is www.example.com, we perform 301 redirects from example.cloudapp.net to www.example.com.
I see that the user agent traffic manager current sends is:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; GTMProbe 1.0)
I want to exclude requests by Traffic Manager from the IIS URL Rewrite rule so that the probing behavior doesn't trigger a redirect, to do this I need to know if the user agent string, specifically the "GTMProbe" portion, is *guaranteed to always* be used in current and future versions of Traffic Manager. Without this guarantee, I could set up the redirect rule now, but in the future if the GTMProbe portion of the user agent is removed or renamed, Traffic Manager could start to follow a redirect, think my cloud service is offline due to it being redirected away from the endpoint it's monitoring, and cause problems for the load balancing rules that have been defined.