Danny Moran

How to use the Microsoft Azure Portal

Published November 05, 2022 by Danny Moran

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Introduction

Learn how to navigate the Microsoft Azure portal. In this example, I show you how to navigate the Microsoft Azure portal, customise your landing page, and set the theme. I also cover the use of cmd.ms, a way to link directly to the blades of Azure services.

How to use the Microsoft Azure Portal video

What is the Microsoft Azure portal web address

The Microsoft Azure portal can be accessed by navigating to: https://portal.azure.com

How to modify the Azure portal view

There are a few options for changing the default view of the Microsoft Azure portal. You can change the colour scheme from the standard Azure colour scheme, you can enable the Blue colour scheme, the Light colour scheme, or the Dark Mode colour scheme. As well as changing the colour schemes, you can also change the home landing page to either the Azure portal homepage, or a custom Azure dashboard, which you can configure to show the health of your services, You can also set a permanent dock on the left hand side of the page, which can be used to pin your most used services, creating easy access to the blades for when you want to setup new resources or modify existing ones.

To make these changes:

  1. Select the settings cog at the top right of the Azure portal.

  2. Select the Appearance + startup views tab

  3. For Menu behaviour, you can configure the left side menu to popout or be always docked.

  4. For Theme, you can select which of the four colour schemes you want to use for your Azure portal. There is Azure, Blue, Light, and Dark.

  5. You can also enable a high contrast mode theme for your Azure portal. This option lets you enable either a white based high contrast mode, or a black based high contrast mode.

  6. Under startup views, you can change the default landing page, so when you login to the Azure portal, you can either be taken to a custom dashboard or the main Azure portal homepage.

Finding Azure Services

There are a couple of ways you can find Azure services:

Using the All Services tab

In the left hand dock menu, select All Services. If your menu isn’t docked, you will have to select the hamburger menu icon at the top right of your Azure portal.

The All Services blade will list every Azure service and resource that is available for you to provision.

Some services will be marked as Preview. Don’t use these services in production, as they are still under development or testing.

Using the serch box

At the top of every page within the Azure portal, there is a search box. It can also be accessed using the keyboard shortcut G+/

This search box is a powerful part of the Azure portal, as not only does it pull back services that can be used, but it also searches the Azure Marketplace for 3rd party services, as well as the Microsoft Docs page to find relevant technical documentation.

Using CMD.MS

https://cmd.ms is a 3rd party tool that lists the unique urls for nearly all Azure services. This tool is useful for getting quick, direct access to the service management blades without having to navigate the Azure portal.

Azure Cloud Shell

The Azure Cloud Shell is a command line in the browser used for managing Azure services. It can be accessed using the PowerShell icon at the top of the page, to the right of the search box, or by going to https://shell.azure.com