Part 6 : Windows Azure Portal Tour

I assume that you now have Windows Azure subscription either free or paid one. In this tutorial I am going to walk you through using the management portal for Windows Azure.

To reach the management portal you need go to  https://manage.windowsazure.com/ and logging in with your susbcription userid and password.  You can manage all your Windows Azure platform resources from a single location and that is Windows Azure Management portal. Windows Azure Management Portal is a slick HTML5 website with much better accessibility from mobile devices.

Windows Azure Management portal evolves over time and  Azure development team continues to make improvements to various aspects of the management portal. So don't surprise to see new things in Management portal.

Once you login to the portal, you'll be taken to the dashboard, where you can see "all items" grid that list out all items on your account from all the feature areas of your Windows Azure platform resources (this includes cloud services, VM's, mobile services, SQL Databases, Storage, service bus etc.). The information that is being shown for each item are name, type, status, subscription detail and location. As you see this area provides a nice snapshot of all your items with thier status.

Figure 1

You can also sort the grid's contents by clicking the column header. Also you can filter items in the grid by clicking the magnifying class in the rightmost column header and typing in the characters you want to search for. The search will match values in the Name, Type, Status, or Location columns that contain the entered text.  Now if you click on the name of any of the items listed in the grid, it will take you to the detailed dashboard for that particular item. 

As you can see in the figure 1 , there is a navigation pane on the left that lists out all the features. Clicking on any feature on the left navigation, for example Web Sites, presents the list of items filtered to that feature as shown in figure 2. More tabs will be added on the left navigation as new features are released. Please note that you may be required to enable the new features from your account settings before they can be displayed here. 

Figure 2

Notice that when you select any item in a particular category, example any website in WEB SITES category, left navigation panel collapse to show only icons to give more space and also to show the selected item. In addition, selecting that item will take you to the dashboard to manage that item as shown in figure 3.

Figure 3

There is a command bar at the bottom which is context sensitive that means that it will show options based on the items you selected on grid or left navigation pane. For example if you select any item from WEB SITES, the command bar will show items like Browse, Stop, Restart etc. relevant to web sites. If you select cloud service the command items will be different. We will cover all the options later as we will look in detail each category.

Notice that there is +NEW button at the left of the command bar. Click on it will open a fly-out window will open that present options to create new items. By default it will select the item to be created of the same category that you have selected on left navigation pane. For example if you have selected web site from left navigation pane, when you click on +NEW button, it will open fly-out window with web site selected.

Windows Azure management portal keeps you updated about the status of services in real time. If you see the list under any category, there is a status column that shows the real time status of that item. 

There is a green status icon on the right hand side of the command bar at the bottom. As you are doing operations on Windows Azure Management portal, this icon tells you the real time status of the operation that you have started.  Clicking on it will open a fly-out window that shows the detail status of the operation you have started. Once operation has been done, you can click on the OK button to dismiss that notification.