BenkoTIPS

Getting an application operational depends on making sure that it can run after the developer has left the room. In the enterprise we have teams of people of focus on that and will go to great lengths to make sure the team that runs the application that was built is solid and predictable. One of the challenges with the cloud is getting an operations team that has been trained to be cloud experts.

To alleviate that problem, Azure supports the dashboard you see in http://portal.azure.com as a shareable resource just like any other service you provision. You can create and customize dashboards by using the portal and pinning tiles that are relevant to your application. When you publish the dashboard you can share it with other teams that have access to Azure, including the operations team.

That is why I created a starter dashboard ARM template you can use to make your deployments more operational. It includes a couple tiles, including a resource group tile and a markdown tile with some instructions on how to customize and share the dashboard with others on your team.

Click the link below to provision it from the Azure portal. I’ve got a pull request to add it to the azure starter template library but until then you can get it from a storage account I’ve uploaded it to. Click the link below to deploy a starter dashboard to your Azure subscription for resource group.