I have an Azure Worker Role and it listens for requests on a port. Multiple Microsoft owned IP's ping that socket every 4-17 seconds non stop. It looks like they drop the connection causing errors in my application. I only noticed it now with some personal logging turned on.
Has anyone heard of microsoft pinging your open ports?
The source IP's are
Azure employs the mechanism called network probes to identify the health of the deployments. I think that what you see is the behavior of that service.
"Guest agent probe (on PaaS VMs only). Azure Load Balancer utilizes the guest agent inside the virtual machine. It listens and responds with an HTTP 200 OK response only when the instance is in the Ready state (i.e. the instance is not in a state like Busy, Recycling, or Stopping). If the guest agent fails to respond with an HTTP 200 OK, Azure Load Balancer marks the instance as unresponsive and stops sending traffic to that instance. Load Balancer will continue to ping the instance." From documentation.
You can ask technical support as well for identify who are those guys.