Azure Monitor Dashboards: Visualize Your Application's Health
Dashboards in Azure Monitor provide a flexible canvas to display and share insights into your application's performance and health across your Azure resources.
Tip: For a more interactive experience, consider using Azure Workbooks, which offer richer visualization and analysis capabilities.
Azure Dashboards are a part of the Azure portal that allows you to create customized views of your cloud resources. You can arrange various tiles, charts, and graphs to monitor key metrics, logs, and alerts in one place.
Customizable Layout: Arrange tiles in any configuration that suits your needs.
Resource Agnostic: Display data from any Azure resource, not just those within a single resource group or subscription.
Real-time Data: Tiles update automatically to show the latest information.
Creating and Managing Dashboards
You can create dashboards directly within the Azure portal.
Navigate to the Azure portal.
Click on "Dashboard" in the left-hand menu, or search for "Dashboard" in the top search bar.
Click "Create new dashboard" or select an existing one to edit.
You can create either a Private dashboard (visible only to you) or a Shared dashboard (visible to others with appropriate permissions).
Adding Charts and Metrics
Most metrics and logs from Azure Monitor can be visualized on a dashboard.
From your dashboard, click "Edit".
Click "Add tile".
Browse the gallery for pre-built tiles or select "Add custom tile" to create your own.
For custom charts, navigate to the specific resource you want to monitor (e.g., a Virtual Machine, App Service).
Go to the "Monitoring" section and select "Metrics" or "Logs".
Configure your chart by selecting metrics, dimensions, and aggregation types.
Click "Pin to dashboard" and choose the dashboard where you want to add it.
Example: Pinning a CPU Usage Chart
To add a CPU usage chart for a Virtual Machine:
Go to the Virtual Machine resource page.
Navigate to Monitoring > Metrics.
Select the Percentage CPU metric.
Configure the time range and aggregation.
Click the "Pin to dashboard" button.
Choose your desired dashboard and click "Pin".
Pinning to Dashboards
The "Pin to dashboard" functionality is a common pattern across many Azure services. It allows you to quickly add visualizations, resource blades, or even entire resource groups to your dashboard.
From Resource Blades: Pin specific metrics, activity logs, or configuration settings.
From Azure Monitor: Pin charts created in Metrics Explorer or Log Analytics queries.
Sharing Dashboards
Sharing dashboards is crucial for team collaboration and ensuring everyone has visibility into the same critical data.
Shared Dashboards: Create a shared dashboard, then assign appropriate role-based access control (RBAC) permissions to users or groups who need to view or edit it.
Export/Import: You can export a dashboard's JSON definition and share it manually, or import it into another subscription or resource group.
Best Practice: Use shared dashboards for critical operational insights and grant read-only access to most users, while limiting edit permissions to a few administrators.