Microsoft Azure – New Azure Home Screen

In this article we will learn how to use the Azure Portal home page. On, the Azure Portal home page, Azure has made some updates and in the article, we are going to look through that. So when you first land on home, you will see that Azure has these multiple sections. Azure has the Azure Services, the recent, navigate tools, and then you have the useful links and mobile app. One of the big things here, Azure has tried to really differentiate the two pieces. So, it has Azure Services and recent resources. That’s more about you and your usage of the product.

And then Azure has a section, which is going to be more fixed and something you can really rely on muscle memory to make use of. So, into the Azure Services, you can always get access to the marketplace by a creative resource, so you can get the full suite of the offering of all the different possible creates that Azure has. 

Now, if you’re new to the product, these will be a featured set, but as you use the product, this will adapt over time to be the thing that you have mostly used. And then finally, you have more services. So, more services are really where you can get access to everything. But then at any point in time, you can really look into the more services, which is the all services offering that you have. And then really see the full suite of things. So, the more you use the product, this adjusts to your usage, but you can still go through the full offering and find anything else. So as you do use the product, this will adapt to you. But at any point in time, you can come to more services and get access to everything. 

So, recent resources, this section may or may not be there depending on your usage, but as you use the product, this will populate, and we have a limit of 12 recent we show here, but you can see you have got a section of recent which you have accessed over the last few minutes but also over the last few days. And now, let’s track that over many months too. So here, you can see that You have got virtual machines and have got app services which you have been manipulating and some of the specs that you have been writing recently. This is going to give you one-click access to the recent resources that you navigate to very frequently.

Now, at any point in time, load up home, your recent resources are one click away and you can get straight into what you were doing. So, that will give you the highest productivity. You just get there, if you need to stop that VM or start that VM or whatever, you go home, one click away. It’s right there.

Moving onto navigating, so navigate is this fixed section, which Azure has curated based on where people like to actually spend their time from a sort of repeated use. So, subscriptions, resource groups, all resources, and your dashboards, you can always get access to these things. These things that used to be in the last navigation, and you sort of had one click away, Azure has made sure that one click away is here too. 

Tools, the tools section itself, is something that is cross-cutting. You can get access to Learn, where you get a whole suite of free resources from Microsoft, be it learning documentation and tutorials, and different sort of step through guides. Azure Monitor, where you can go through and monitor all your resources, set alerts. Security Center, where you can actually see all of your resources and which resources are in compliance and which are out and really take action there and then to make sure you are secure. And then cost management, so you can go through and create budgets, manipulate your costs, and really manage them and keep them under control. And one of the things to mention in addition to Learn being free is that Azure is adding learn integration throughout the portal in many other places.  And the idea is that as you are trying to use Azure and learn how to use Azure, Azure put the right content in front of you, so you can use it effectively and learn effectively. 

And then useful links, speaking of documentation, there’s technical documentation links here, but you can also get links to an expert or be it you want to go and get started quickly, there’s a reference to Azure Quick Start Center. And there’s always a place to go find the recent updates. And then Azure have their mobile app. Azure has a mobile app for iOS and for Android. You can actually get access to the stores directly from the home page and go and download the apps. 

So one of the things you may have noticed when you land on the home is that the left navigation is no longer there. Azure has moved the left navigation to keep the product cleaner and allow you more focus when you are actually in the different experiences and navigate and paste the page. So, at any point in time, if you want to get back to your left navigation, you can come to the top left and click the hamburger and you will see that familiar left navigation. And you can dive off into your favorites and the sort of common set of navigating options.  

If pinning this thing is something you desire, you can come back to the settings page and you can go and change that setting and you can go back between the dock mode and the flyout mode at any point in time. If you’re jumping between large or small resolutions, that’s something you can quickly get access to.

And then one last thing, about learning integration. You can see the service cards. There will be a follow-up video on the deck of service cards and the offering that Azure has here, but you want to briefly touch upon it. So from home, you can actually hover on any of those recent services and you can get quick access to recent resources within those services, create and browse but also some of the free training and other useful links. So, the service you get around training. And that’s part of creating that bridge and creating a better link between the product and documentation.

Hence, this is how you can use the new Azure home screen.