The deployed web api service has "Always On" turned on, which will have the front-end load balancer to send a request to the application root every 5 minutes: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/configure-common?tabs=portal.

This can be seen from application insight:

We probably don't want to disable "Always On". We can map the application root to the health check end point or come up with better solutions.