Relationship to Other Configuration Interfaces

The Traffic Manager has a number of other configuration interfaces, such as the Admin UI, the REST API, the CLI, and the SOAP API. All of these mechanisms rely on the Traffic Manager being deployed and then iteratively configured until it is in the desired state.

When fully managing the configuration of your Traffic Manager, the Configuration Importer is an alternative to, and a replacement for, these other configuration interfaces. The administrator makes changes by altering the primary configuration documents, automatically triggering the updated configuration to be applied to the Traffic Manager. The other configuration interfaces still provide the current state of the configuration and the health of the Traffic Manager, but an administrator should not normally update the configuration through these interfaces as any such changes are overwritten when the next import is triggered.

During a one-time import, an administrator uses the Configuration Importer in conjunction with the other configuration interfaces. After the one-time import supplies the initial configuration, the administrator makes any further iterative changes through the Traffic Manager’s usual configuration interfaces.

Importing configuration is a similar operation to restoring a backup, however the format of the imported configuration is easier to maintain and version control than a backup file and follows the well-documented REST API configuration schema.

The Configuration Importer supports layering of configuration documents to allow multiple sources of Traffic Manager configuration to be merged together in a declarative way. This capability is similar to the Traffic Manager's "Partial Backups" feature and the "zconf" utility, both of which support backup and restore of subsets of the Traffic Manager configuration. However, partial backups do still build configuration iteratively and have an internal format that is not as suitable for editing and maintenance as configuration documents.

For more details on how to layer configuration across multiple documents, see Layering Configuration Documents.