I'm Dean Cefola and this is The Azure Academy it's been said that lists help
us in our lives in many different ways they help to reduce anxiety because
we've got things in order they help to boost brainpower improve our focus and
even increase our self-esteem if you can believe that because you can cross
things off your list that you've accomplished them well today on the
Azure Academy I've got a list for you and that is a list of the top 10 changes
that have recently been made to the azure portal
so as we kick off our top 10 list please do click on the subscribe button and
join us here at the Azure Academy community and leave us a comment below
on any questions that you have or a video that you'd like us to do in the
future there's still a lot out there we haven't covered from ignite and it's
first-come first-serve so whatever you all ask for is what I'll create so let's
jump right over to the azure portal this would be kind of a fun video today as we
look at all of the different changes to the portal experience that have happened
in the last several weeks kicking it right off we have the new home screen
and this has been changed from the previous home screen and now that we
have resource services across the top so this is your most recently accessed
items and there is a link right here for more services which will take you to
that same hamburger style menu that we had in the past and we'll come back to
this view in a moment but we also have our recently used resources that now
show up in a table view and a navigation structure here to help us kind of get
around the portal now one of the other big integrations to this home screen is
Microsoft learn so learn in case you haven't checked it out yet learn as a
place where you can follow Learning Path so if we click browse all paths here
then you can pick a role or product or level or type of thing that you're doing
for example if we look at advanced administrator tasks then these are all
of the learning paths that fulfill that particular selection that I've made so
we can do that by looking at any one of these so let's say here dynamics 3 6 5
and then this will take us down the road of learning all about that and we
a little overview and what's in each of these sections you can jump to each
section if you want to or just follow the path right from the start so
there'll be a bunch of different stuff in here there could be just text to read
pictures videos links to add some code into the interface to make sure that
you've learned and understood things properly so a great place to come and do
some extra learning so that's Microsoft learn and then along with that we have
other tools around managing the clouds so these are kind of governance related
so we have azure monitor Security Center and cost management and then down here
at the bottom some other useful links have been added and then we have of
course the mobile app which will come back to a little bit later as well so
looking at our first link here technical documentation these are the azure docs
so quick way to get to them right from the home screen migration tools would be
as your migrated and this page is a list of all of the azure services and there
are quite a few I think there's a hundred and fifty six services now and
then that find an expert this is using Azure lighthouse click the subscribe
button if you want to see a video on Azure lighthouse we are preparing that
and you don't want to miss that one and we also have a link for all of the
recent updates to Azure including a link to set up your own RSS feed so you can
get these on as they come out and a link to the Azure Quick Start Center we've
spent a lot of time here in our governance series and that's all to be
found under the azure setup guide as well as a migration guide for how you
can move into the cloud and recently we've added an innovation guide and this
has to do with modernizing your workloads and then of course there's
some stuff down at the bottom for quickly deploying some other basic
resource types that most people need a little help when they get started and
then we have that link for the Azure mobile app and you can click on that to
download it for iOS or Android whatever your preferred platform is so the focus
of all of this is to keep the things that are relevant to you and what you
are doing kind of front and center at all times so along with that we have new
service cards and this is something that if you hover over something like Azure
Active Directory you'll get a card here showing you that you can click on this
to view this particular item or go right to Microsoft Learn for some training or
go to our Docs getting started page or pricing we can see that if we go over to
virtual machines as well we can create a VM from here or view our existing a
little description some stuff around training at Microsoft learn as well as
some useful links and even some free offerings in this case so definitely
something to check out in the new service cards now going back
to this hamburger menu which we can also get to from more services this is the
improved service experience so we've also got all those cards in play here as
well so that's great we don't lose that and more Microsoft Learn links right
here so we are very invested in you learning more about asher and that's why
this whole channel of the Azure Academy exists and why Microsoft learn exists
and if you've got any questions about MS learn or any comments put them in the
comment section below and I'll make sure that those get over to our learn team we
do work quite closely with them so in this new experience we've got our
featured resources across the top and these are the ones that most people use
most often but we still have that categorized view down the side starting
with all that's your traditional all services view that we've had in the
portal for a while and then you can click on each individual area so you can
see the general area at the top and when I click on general then that area is
here and then change it over to compute you can see the compute resources etc so
if we go back to the overview that's our main services page and again a link
right to the Quick Start Center from here or the free services that are up in
Adger or find a link for those msps going back
to the azure lighthouse we've also improved the services view and what I
mean is anytime you click on a service like storage accounts you've got a list
of resources across all of the resource groups and subscriptions that you have
permission to or are looking at in your global filter and then if we take a look
at the very long list of all of the azure resources across all subscriptions
that we have you can see that there are seven pages worth of
resources we can of course group these by resource type or by subscription
location etc that's been a feature for a while but what we can also do now is we
can also do an export to CSV so we can take every resource that we have and
just dump it out into a CSV file then we can sort that and organize it and format
it and that'll give us everything from the resources to the very extended tags
that are possible and of course you can filter on this and sort and organize and
do whatever you would like with it and a piece of continuous improvement that's
going on across Asscher are the individual resource creation experiences
so for example if we go to create a new virtual machine then this experience has
been updated for quite a while now and you've got a tabbed experience across
the top here we can just select and build out what it is that you need to
some other resources are not quite up to date with that yet for example we go to
create a virtual network we can see that this is still the old experience so
these things are going to be updated over time and pretty soon your portals
will be updated so that your virtual network creation experience looks
something like this and then you'll have a tabbed experience which will make
setting things up for your network quite a bit easier the next one that we'll
look at will put in the search bar here it's the resource graph Explorer so
resource graph is a tool that we haven't really covered on the azure Academy but
basically everything that powers the screens that have lots of information on
them are powered on the backend by the resource graph it's a way to query the
API is more directly and then surface that information to you in a nicer
format so for example if we go to our all services what you're looking at here
Y it populates across the 30 subscriptions that I have access to with
seven pages worth of resources that fast is thanks to the resource graph so the
resource graph Explorer will help us to write our queries against all of the
resources that we have across Asscher and that way we can do some
investigative work what's going on and that's been around
for a little while but now we've also got resource graph queries so we can
open the graph Explorer from here this is a place where all of your queries
that you write will be saved and then can be reused so if we go back to the
Explorer here and we write ourselves a query so if we do something to give us a
count of all of our resources and then we run that query we can see that we've
got 752 resources or we can get a little bit more specific say with something
like how many key vaults do I have there we go 17 different key vaults or I could
take out the count and it will give me all of the 17 assets across all the
different subscriptions that I have access to ok so the resource graph is
definitely a cool thing to learn if you don't know it already and the resource
graph is written against the Cousteau language so if we take this query and we
save this now we can choose to save it as a private query or as a shared query
so I'll save it shared and then we have an option to create a resource graph
queries resource group or we could uncheck it and use an existing group
like I'll use my asher management group for this and we'll hit save and there is
our resource graph query so now if we go back to our resource graph queries space
we can see there is our query as well the next thing on our list is going to
be dashboards now I know you've seen dashboards before and let me resize this
so this is a very complex dashboard and actually this comes out of the azure
Sentinel it's a built-in dashboard from there and if you missed our Sentinel
video you can check that out in the card up here
the thing about dashboards is not necessarily what we put on them or the
tables or anything the feature update here is that dashboards now
automatically refresh over some time intervals so if we zoom back in so you
can read everything we see here we have an auto refresh every hour and this can
be changed to a couple hours or every day turn it off or update every 30
minutes so that'll help your dashboards to
automatically stay up-to-date instead of having to periodically go in and click
the refresh button and that also brings me to some of the updated icons that we
have in case you didn't notice the icons have been recently refreshed and now
made publicly everywhere so everything in Azure is getting a
facelift and modernizing a little more the idea here is that we have better
visual contrast in our icons and that they're more distinct from one another
so if you have some comments about that give us any feedback either down below
or you can press the feedback icon up here we're always looking for getting
your feedback and this particular new feature of removing the sidebar did
cause some people quite a panic and they weren't sure where it went or what to do
or how to get it back and then we had the feature there but it was somewhat
hidden so I want to show it to you so that you can see it so right now I've
got a sidebar and if I go to settings I can choose to make the default mode for
the portal to fly out or be docked and that's referring to this sidebar so if I
change it to fly out you can see my bar goes away benefit of that is it gives
you a little more screen real estate you're a little more focused in the
particular area of the portal that you're looking at but that menu is still
available here under the hamburger so you can get to that you can get to all
services in the same way not really a big deal in my case although I
definitely did prefer the doc to view so I'll put my sidebar back there and of
course the other thing is that we do have in case you weren't familiar
several different portal settings here where you can have the portal
automatically sign you out after a certain duration as well as changing
your default view from the home screen to a dashboard and then of course
changing your theme in many different ways I prefer dark theme because I'm
staring at my screen all day long but you can also choose high contrast themes
either a light or dark whatever your preference is for that language and
region support have now added into the portal so if you prefer a
different language then you can by all means set that up directly in the Azure
portal regardless of what your other system settings are and you can also
change your regional format from being English United States to perhaps
English United Kingdom and of course you can change these things as many times as
you like to find what works best for you and so now we're gonna take a look at
the azure mobile app and when I start my mobile app I've got it set for
multi-factor authentication so I'll use my fingerprint ID there and so the
mobile app has had a redesign as well so we've got our updated icons and new home
screen and you can click on the hamburger menu here at the top and
that'll show you the different as your a DS that you have access to as well as
different identities that you can log on with then we have our settings and you
can choose anything from customizing the home experience which things you want on
that screen and which you do not to allowing push notifications require
touch ID multiple subscription mode and there's even a Welcome tour here if you
haven't seen that that'll just walk you through the experience you can slide
right through to see all that you can do in the portal app and then back in the
app itself we've got an edit button here at the top and that'll take you to that
same editing of the home screen menu as well as there is the filter button and
the filter allows you to select which subscriptions you're looking at and I'm
just looking at my two main subscriptions here and then at the very
bottom we've got all of our home subscription resources notifications and
a cloud shell so if I click on the cloud shell here and we get a neat little
animation while it spins up my cloud shell instance and there we go we have a
cloud shell so now if I bring up my keyboard here I can type my AZ command
and there we've got everything that we need so this is a bash shell and if I
turn my phone sideways so I'll just put in a command to get all my tags
so this just gives me the total count of tags across all of my subscriptions
fully integrated cloud shell here and you could even switch it over to
PowerShell if you want to but we'll save that for another video so back in the
main screen of our app here we could go to our subscriptions and dig into each
one of them and see the different resource groups that are present or we
could even go to a particular kind of resource here so I've got it set on
virtual machines but in the top right I can hit the filter and then change this
from the type that I'm looking at to include all types or just a select type
and then hit the checkmark that'll change my view then so I could look at
my bash in service if I want to or look at my storage account or whatever else
I'm interested in and there's also notifications that are
here which would be service health as well as alerts thankfully no service
health alerts right now so I can do a lot of management from the mobile app as
you can see and so we've improved this experience quite a lot so hope you've
enjoyed looking at the top things that have changed recently across the azure
portal and the azure mobile app and all of this experience has been driven by
your feedback so please keep your feedback coming and if you haven't done
so already join us here at the azure academy community and click that
subscribe button and click the like button if you thought that this was a
good video and if you want to get an email when our videos come out which is
roughly once a week you can click on that notification bell and don't forget
to leave us some comments down below we do love your feedback and please keep it
coming we'll see you in the next one happy learning