[BASIC] 5 Tips for your Azure Portal

Everyone who starts working with Microsoft Azure will use the Azure Portal more or less. There are some nice things you really should know about the Azure Portal. This will make you life easier.

Navigate Azure Portal with Keyboard

Did you know that you can navigate the Portal with your Keyboard. Microsoft has created some very handy shortcuts for commonly used tasks and actions:

This allows you to jump to the desired area or task … way faster than you could mover your mouse 🙂

Optimize the Design of Azure

Over the last months there had been several changes to the Azure Portal. Some people are complaining about those changes. But never forget, that you can modify the design of your Portal (slightly) to your needs:

• modify color / theme
• modify portal menu (hidden or docked)
• switch default view between Home and Dashboard
• change your language settings (I always recommend English, as translations are a pain sometimes)
• choose for high contrast

This helps to make the Azure Portal more accessible. Nice 🙂

Pin what you really need

The Azure Portal Menu on the left side is your daily Go-To-Space for Administration. Therefor you should really arrange you items in the list so that it helps you.

You can add or remove items from the menu with a little patience:

• hover your mouse over the item you would like to add or remove
• wait till the panel opens „magically“ (one of my hate features in portal … I am there to work … and not to wait)
• then you can use the little star to add or remove the item from the menu

And remember … the first 10 items can be accessed with a keyboard shortcut. 🙂

Filter the Azure Portal to keep overview

If you are managing a huge list of Azure Subscriptions and resources, you have multiple options to filter your results and views.

The best filter in my opinion is the overall Subscription filter. This can help you to focus your work on a specific subscription or set of subscriptions.

It also can help to filter out things like the „Access to AzureAD Subscriptions“ from the past … because they are causing errors in views like Azure Security Center.

So keep in mind: Filter and Focus 🙂

Fix issues in Azure Portal

I have written about this topic already on this blog … but as we all know … it is better to repeat important things.

Sometime it happens, that the Portal has some kind of a hiccup, which leads to missing blades or dropdowns that are not working.

I had struggled with this once in an Azure Site Recovery blade … and I was really frustrated. But there is an easy way to fix the Azure Portal from such issues. You can easily reset the Azure Portal Cache.

When clicking this button you will not only reset the default Dashboard…it will also remove all cached data. So DropDowns are reloaded and data is gathered again.