Azure Portal

The latest Web-based Azure Portal uses a new visual design that supports customizable dashboards. Users are presented with a dashboard (top screen shown here) when they log in to the portal. Dashboards can be customized by choosing, arranging, and sizing tiles that display aspects of resources deployed on Azure (such as virtual machines and Web Apps). Tiles can display resource health, performance, costs, and other metrics; links to particular resource configuration and informational user interfaces (UIs); and other items selected from a tile gallery or pinned from UIs available elsewhere in the portal. A user can create multiple dashboards and switch between them (using the drop-down menu with the current dashboard name, which is “Dashboard” in the top screen shown here), and dashboards can be shared with other users.

Resources are explored and configured with UIs presented as vertical blades that accumulate left to right as a user drills into settings or properties options. Here (lower screen) the user has opened a Storage resource, displaying a list of tasks and settings and a summary view of that resource in a blade. Clicking the Blobs item displayed the rightmost blade (Blob service), which lists the blobs in the Storage resource. Clicking the blob in that blade would display another blade to the right.