Leon Welicki: Hello there. Thank you very much for
joining us today in this Azure Portal How To video.
Today, we learn how to create, share, and use Azure
Portal dashboards. And for that, we have Adam
Abdelhamed with us that is going to show us all of that.
So, thank you for joining, Adam.
Adam Abdelhamed: Thanks Leon. So, yeah, we’re going
to go over how to create, share and use Azure dashboards.
Here, what I’ve got is a dashboard I’ve already created. So,
I have this virtual machine that I know I have to manage
pretty much every day, and this dashboard helps me manage
it more quickly and navigate more efficiently.
What I’ve got here is a few tiles to help me do that.
First, we’ve got one where I’ve just put a little bit of
instructions, sort of for myself, or maybe for anyone else
on the team. That was just configured with some basic
markdown syntax.
Leon: So, basically you can add any markdown that you
want into that tile, and then you can make it available
for everyone using this dashboard, right?
Adam: That’s right. Then we’ve got here a basic shortcut
tile that’s going to take me into the main management
page for that virtual machine. This exposes all the
management capabilities that the portal offers.
And finally, over here, what we’ve got is a clock tile
that’s just going to show the local time for where I know
this dashboard is geolocated on Earth.
Below that, we’ve got some monitoring metrics, which are
sort of the key metrics for this virtual machine. Things
like CPU, Network and Disk. Below that, we’ve even got a
little YouTube video featuring this fine gentleman over here,
you might recognize him.
Leon: I see one fine gentleman and me.
Jerry: And then finally, just sort of another list of all my
other resources.
Now, one thing that I wanted to point out for those of you
who’ve used dashboards in the past, we’ve just added this new
pretty cool feature here, which lets me control the time
range for these charts sort of centrally. So, rather than
have to change the time range one by one, if I wanted to
change it, so for example, this is showing data for the past
hour, or sorry, past thirty days. If I wanted to change that
to the past hour, I could click up here, and it would let me do
that. You can also see that any tiles that support the time
range will sort of light up. And the ones that don’t will
sort of dim away. So, let’s do that.
Leon: Oh, that’s really good. So, basically are applying
here to the metric tiles, but there are many other tiles that
support these platforms, right?
Adam: That’s right.
And so now, that’s my dashboard that I’ve created for
me. Right now, only I can see it. If I want others on the
team to be able to share and collaborate on this dashboard,
I’ll go ahead and click the share command.
You’ll notice that it’s going to ask me to not only give it a
name, but also choose subscription and a resource group.
The reason that is, is because in Azure, shared dashboards
are implemented as Azure resources. So, just like a
virtual machine or a storage account, an Azure dashboard
is a resource that’s managed in Azure Resource Manager.
The other thing that means is that access to these
dashboards is going to be managed using role based
access control, just like any other resource. So, if a user
has at least the reader role, in access control to the
subscription and resource group that we pick here, then
when they log in, they will see the dashboard in their list
of dashboards. So, we won’t publish it right now but ,yeah, I
would just click that button and it would be done.
Leon: And that’s really cool because basically we are
using the same rules that people know and love to share
the resources in Azure to share the dashboards, right?
Adam: That’s right. And in addition to just RBAC
managing access to the dashboard itself, we’ve got
sort of fine grain control on the tiles. So, let’s say you
had a dashboard that has tiles from lots of different
resources, and I give you access to the dashboard but
you only have access to a few of those resources.
The tiles that you have access to will work and the ones
you don’t will show no access. So, you get pretty fine
grain control there, which is pretty neat.
Leon: That’s really cool. So, basically even if you share the
dashboard and you are concerned about access to the
information, we got you there because the fact that we have
role based access control that is threaded through the entire
system is helping us in this case, right?
Adam: Absolutely.
So, that’s a dashboard that we’ve already created, now
you know how to share it. Let’s just quickly show how I
would create a new dashboard.
Leon: Perfect.
Adam: So, I’ll click new dashboard here. That’s going to
put me into this sort of blank canvas, and it’s going to
reveal the tile gallery. Now, the tile gallery has a bunch
here’s the video tile. I could just sort of paste in a Channel
9 link there or a YouTube link or any mp4 file that’s
sort of doesn’t require any authentication will work there.
We’ve got the markdown tile here that we showed as well
and many others. So, it’s going to reveal the markdown
editor there.
Leon: You can search there, right? I see that there’s a
long list, but you can filter.
Adam: That’s right. So, I could have gone like this.
Leon: Perfect.
Adam: There we go.
Leon: Now you got it.
Adam: I can give it a custom name. So, we’ll call this,
Leon’s dashboard.
And when I’m happy with how it looks, I can just hit,
done customizing. And I’ll close that, too.
In addition to the tile gallery, there are other ways to get
tiles on the dashboard, as well. So, let me just go here and
use search. You can see that my recent VM that we were just
looking at is right there. So, I’ll click on that. Many of the
pages in the portal will offer a pin command, and that’s
going to just pin a shortcut to this page to the current
dashboard. And when I scroll down, you’ll see that sometimes
in line in the pages in the dashboard as well, or in the
portal as well, will have in-line pin commands. And this
is where we got those monitoring metrics before. So, I’ll
just click around there. We go back to our dashboard and
you see I’ve got all those tiles. I can go back into edit
and I can arrange them and make them look nice and kind
of optimize them for my resolution. And that’s sort of it.
want that?
Adam: Well, I can simply drag the tiles. Some tiles only
support fixed sizes, others can be dragged to any size.
And then, yeah, just drag and drop and that’s it.
You can even when you’re all done, so I’ll go back to
the one we started with, which kind of already looks nice.
If I want, I could even put this up on a projector, put it into
fullscreen mode and sort of leave it there for the team to
look at all day.
Leon: That’s very cool, Adam. That’s awesome.
Adam: So, that’s pretty much it. We covered how to
use a dashboard, how to share it, and then how to use
the tile gallery and the in-page pin gestures to create a
new dashboard.
Leon: Thank you, Adam. And thank you very much for
watching this video. Please try Azure dashboard and let us
know what you think. Leave us a comment in the YouTube
video or follow us on Twitter. Thank you very much and see
in the next video.