Azure Weekly Insights

- [Instructor] In this week's weekly insight, I'm going to show you how to customize the Azure portal and the dashboard to meet your needs. We are currently looking at the default dashboard, which includes, in my case, a list of all of my resources, yours will look different, a quick start, and tutorials. And to the left, I have a list of all of my favorite resources that are easy to access. The first thing we'll do is adjust the portal settings, but before we do that, I'm going to go ahead and select all resources, and you'll see why this is important in a moment.

Next, go ahead, click on the gear icon. This'll bring up the list of the portal settings. Here, you can choose when to have your account logged out, after a specific time frame. We can also go ahead and choose a theme, including high-contrast themes for easier viewing. Next, we can go ahead and enable or disable toast notifications, and those toast notifications are those quick information notifications that let you know about a specific action.

For example, such as a virtual machine has been provisioned. This is followed by allowing a double-click on the dashboard to change a theme, and I'll show you this in action in a moment. And finally, all resources browse experience. And this is why I wanted to have all the resources open. If I go ahead and enable that, you'll now notice that we can filter on those resources, that's pretty cool. It's also here that you can change the language, the regional format, and if you happen to be a Microsoft partner, you can also add in your partner ID here.

Let's go ahead, select dashboard once more. Remember I said we could go ahead and double-click to change the theme? To do so, double-click anywhere in the dashboard, and those themes will cycle through. Now, let's go ahead and customize the dashboard itself. And to do so, in the dashboard, right-click and select edit. It's from here that you can go ahead and delete current tiles. You can also add new tiles, and customize them as required.

One I happen to like is the Markdown, because here you can actually provide some information about the dashboard. We can also change the size of our tiles, and move them around. When you're finished customizing, go ahead and select Done customizing. We can also pin any resource to the dashboard from the resource itself, such as a virtual machine.

I'll select a virtual machine, and then I can go ahead and pin this to the dashboard. You'll now see, we have easy access to server one. You can also go ahead and customize this menu. You can move the items up and down within the menu. We can also add new items by selecting all services, and then selecting the items we'd like to have in our list.

And finally, you're not limited to just one dashboard, you can have multiple dashboards. As you can see, I do have a secondary dashboard here that looks a little bit different, and we can go ahead and create a new dashboard that you can then customize. We can upload our completed dashboards as well as download them. We can share them, we can close them, and, when we're done with them, such as in the case of Another Dashboard, we can simply go ahead and delete them.

I hope you found this tip helpful. Now, go ahead and start customizing your Azure portal and dashboard.