Quick Tour Of Azure Portal

Introduction

For novice Cloud developers, aspiring Cloud architects, Pre-sales consultants and all other IT professionals associated with the Cloud computing, especially with Microsoft Azure, this article will explain the capabilities of Microsoft Azure portal, along with how it could be helpful for organizing our Azure resources.

Quick High-level Overview

Microsoft Azure portal is a unified hub in your Browser, which simplifies building, deployment and managing all your Cloud resources and puts it in one easily used console. It’s an entry point for getting started with any Azure Service. Right from organizing the dashboard to providing live status of the Services being consumed, Azure portal plays a vital role in building an Application on Azure.

Its capabilities to create multiple dashboards, quick shortcuts for Azure products, smart navigation to market place in addition to switching within the directories along with customizing the look and feel of the user interface with respect to cosmetics makes Azure portal; a perfect Window to work with.

Prerequisites

To experience this super cool Azure portal dashboard,

1. Microsoft Azure Account: If not, create your free account.

Let’s start. Go to Microsoft Azure portal, log-in with your Azure account credentials and you will be at Azure portal.



Click at left navigation pane. Here, you will find all the different Services offered by Microsoft Azure.



Click on ‘+ ‘. Here, at market-place, you can find thousands of options from third parties across many different vendors.



Dashboard is fully customizable. You can have your personal dashboard, clone of other dashboard, multiple dashboard for different resources -- anything.

Now, I have three dashboards. I can switch to any of them, any time, as per my requirement. Each dashboard has its own collection of resources as built.



Click ‘New Dashboard’ to create new dashboard for your account. You can add, pin, move remove the provided tiles at left pane in to your dashboard.



Once done with all customization, click ‘Done Customizing‘ button and you are done. You will be on your newly created dashboard.



Edit Dashboard
It will allow you to edit collection of your dashboard.

Fullscreen
It will display Azure portal dashboard in full screen mode. You can click ‘Esc’ to get back to normal mode.

Clone
It will make a copy of any existing dashboard in to your account.

Delete
Will delete your existing dashboard. It will ask for confirmation before deleting.



Share
For sharing your dashboard, you need to publish it as an Azure resource. Azure Role Based Access Control will determine who has an access to the dashboard. By default, it’s private. Verify the details and click publish.



The icon mentioned below will display notification with respect to your action performed over the portal like resource deployed, deleted, credit remaining etc. It’s a notification hub for Azure portal.



This icon is for having cosmetics settings of your portal UI.

You can change the theme, default language, background color, Zoom your view by just a click. Once done, click Apply button.

There is an option to restore all the changes being made to its default settings. Thus, you need not to worry about any modification being done with respect to its cosmetics.



Here by clicking this icon, you can provide your feedback, suggestion to Microsoft Azure team with respect to your portal experience.



This icon will help you to create Support request with respect to your Azure Services, manage your existing request, if you made any, about various important help documents, keyboard shortcuts along with the displaying diagnostics.



Summary

Azure portal makes life easy for the developers by clubbing all the required details of Azure resources at one single place. I would recommend you to play around with it for some time and you will love to have such exiting features.

We will be learning more about Azure Service offerings in the upcoming articles. Stay tuned.

I hope, you will have enjoyed this tutorial. If you have any questions with respect to the same or any interesting use-case or suggestions, please do comment below.

Knowledge grows by sharing. Don't forget to share this article. If it has  helped you, it will also help many others too.

Thank You. Happy Azure coding.