How to create device groups

Group end-users based on their devices, operating systems, or browsers with information provided by the User-Agent HTTP request header. By using Device Groups to categorize requests, you can make your application more responsive.

With this guide, you’ll create and activate a new device group to identify mobile devices that access your application.


  1. Access Real-Time Manager (RTM).
  2. On the upper-left corner of the page, open the Products menu, represented by three horizontal lines, and then select Edge Application.
  3. Click the edge application to which you want to create a new device group.
  4. Select the Device Groups tab.
  5. Click the Add Device Group button.
  6. Name your device group. The name of your device group can’t contain spaces and must have only alphanumeric characters. For example: Mobile.
  7. In the User Agent field, specify a regular expression that will meet the desired criteria. For example: (Mobile|iPhone|Android).
  8. Click the Save button.

Now that your device group is set, you can use Rules Engine to determine what action must be taken if the expression is matched to a User-Agent header. In this case, a custom Device-Is header will be received in the response:

  1. Navigate to the Rules Engine tab.
  2. Click Add Rule > select Response Phase.
  3. Give your rule a name. For example: Device Group: Mobile.
  4. In the Criteria section, select the variable ${device_group}.
  5. Select the operator is equal.
  6. Add the name of the device group as configured in the previous instructions. For example: Mobile.
  7. In the Behavior section, select the behavior Add Response Header.
  8. As an argument, add Device-Is: Mobile device.
  9. Click the Save button.
  10. Wait a few minutes for the changes to propagate through the edge.

If your current browser sends a User-Agent header similar to the example, you can test whether the request went through by accessing your application from a mobile device or artificially adding the header and its value to the request using the following command:

Terminal window
curl -I https://xxxxxxxxxx.map.azionedge.net/ -H "User-Agent: iPhone Android"

You should receive a list of headers including the custom header added by the rule: device-is: Mobile device. Now that you’ve verified that the devices are being correctly categorized, you can customize the desired behavior using the same rule.


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