I previously found navigation in Azure Portal quite annoying. The go-to was often to search for the specific resource/instance that you wanted to navigate to, which was unusable when you quickly needed to switch between different resources/instances. Probably, there exist many solutions to this problem, but a custom-made dashboard became my solution. These dashboards are made for monitoring but can easily be transformed for navigation purposes.
In a recent project, we had four different environments dev, test, acc, and production. All of the environments had the same setup of resources but in their own resource group and followed a set naming convention. I used the below dashboard for navigation between resources and environments.
I’ve removed the name of all resources, but the name acts like links to the specific resources
A dashboard like this creates a great overview and simplifies navigation between environments and resources. The tiles used to create the above dashboard are
- Markdown tile for the headers (
dev02,test,acc, andprod) - Resources (grouped by resource groups)
The final tip is to use the dashboard as the start page in Azure so that when you need to navigate to a resource, you visit the home page and select the resource from the dashboard. Go to Settings -> Appearance + start views and select dashboard as the startup page.