Hit external IPs from microservices using Spring Cloud

I'm trying to hit external services from one of my microservices. I'm using Spring Cloud, Eureka for the registry and Spring boot as main framework.

Map<String, String> urlVariables = new HashMap<>();
    urlVariables.put("ip_address", IP);
    urlVariables.put("port", PORT);

    ResponseObject state =
            restTemplate.getForObject("http://{ip_address}:{port}/state/", ResponseObject.class, urlVariables);

From what I see, Spring Cloud injects Ribbon as the HTTP client for the Rest Template, and when I try to hit this IP (e.g: 193.172.x.x) it produces the following error:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: No instances available for 193.172.x.x at org.springframework.cloud.netflix.ribbon.RibbonClientHttpRequestFactory.createRequest(RibbonClientHttpRequestFactory.java:64) at org.springframework.http.client.support.HttpAccessor.createRequest(HttpAccessor.java:76) at org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate.doExecute(RestTemplate.java:567) at org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate.execute(RestTemplate.java:540) at org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate.getForObject(RestTemplate.java:247)

It looks like Ribbon is trying to find a microservice instance with that name instead of looking outside. Is there any way to configure Ribbon to look for external IPs, or is it only for internal use?