Customize your Azure Portal – Your Azure, Your Way

It isn’t just Burger King that let’s you “have it your way” today as we see the launch of the fully customizable Azure Cloud dashboard option.  It’s a very cool way to set up a portal that makes your goto items easy to see and quick to access.  One of the most common complaints among systems admins as they explore more public cloud products is the lack of a centralized view.  This is not the proverbial single pane of glass, but it is a very nifty way to get the Azure content you need in your default view.

 

Once you log into your Azure dashboard, you’ll see the Edit button at the top which lets you add a number of different widgets to the default view.

Sizing and Customizing

Choosing the location of your widgets is drag and drop level of easy as you can see in the image above.  One thing that is not drag and drop at the moment is the widget sizing.  Simply click the three dots in the bar that show up as you hover over your widget in edit mode to get access to the size layout chooser:

As you set up your custom view, you will also see that you can create more than one dashboard.  This is a handy option if you have multiple environments that you want to see in context.  Choose the drop arrow at the top title section of your dashboard to create and change dashboards.

There are lots of good things coming in the Azure environment which show the enterprise focus that Microsoft is putting into things.  As a consumer of all three of the major public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP), I am becoming more used to finding the focus areas and advantages in certain portions.  Having this first update to the customized dashboards looks like a very admin/Ops type of advantage.  Looking forward to seeing more updates in the UI/UX as this and other features evolve.

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