Application Insights for AzureWebsite showing GET / requests every five minutes even after deleting availability test

Question

I have a production Azure website that I deployed a few days ago. I saw the "Availability" section in application insights (configured server side AI and client side AI is enabled right now) and through the new portal (portal.azure.com) I decided to set up availability "ping" test.

I left the majority of the settings at the default, Test Type was URL ping test, the URL is set to the root of my app, and frequency is 5 minutes. I left the test locations to the default of 5 in the different US regions.

What I noticed was that all the tests failed and I saw a lot of requests in my app for GET / with a status of 404. Since it was filling up my application insights request log with junk, and the availability test registered all failures, I deleted the availability test. Annoyingly after deleting, I noticed it was still there after refreshing the page, so I deleted it again and now it shows as "Not configured" and seems to be truly gone.

Before I deleted the availability test, I saw all these GET / requests in my AI logs and I looked at their IP addresses, they indeed seemed to come from the different US regions.

After I deleted the test, I assumed they would all stop. Unfortunately that did not happen, all but 1 of the 5 ping tests stopped but the one from with IP address as ::1 still seems to be happening. For almost a week that ping test still occurs every 5 minutes even though I deleted it.

How to remove the availability test completely from application insights?

Answer 1

The request that you see every 5 minutes is likely caused by the Always On feature, which uses it to keep the site alive. It is not related to the availability test.

You can verify that by temporarily turning off Always On and verifying that those requests stop.