Getting started with Azure dashboards

Azure is the cloud service provider of choice for a variety of reasons – such as its ease of use, its wide variety of services, the strong community around it and its integration with other Microsoft services. While Azure comes with native data visualization solutions such as dashboards and workbooks, they require a significant amount of Azure knowledge to create and maintain. They're also not the easiest to share around as you'd need to onboard the user to Entra ID in order to access the dashboards, which isn't ideal if you want to share your dashboards to a large and varied audience. Here's where SquaredUp comes in!

In this article we will take a look at how easy and quick it is to create and share Azure dashboards for most Azure services, even when you're only nominally familiar with Azure.

Connecting the data source

To deploy the Azure plugin as a data source, you have 2 options. You can either use your Azure credentials to log in and inherit all the permissions on the account, or you can create an app registration in Azure and use the client ID and secret to authenticate to SquaredUp.

Next, list the subscriptions you want to connect to and add the data source. Assuming everything is in place, SquaredUp should now have read-only access to Azure and start indexing objects.

Exploring the OOB Dashboards

The Azure plugin comes with a bunch of out-of-the-box dashboards, such as Alerts and some KQL and Metric-based dashboards for the most common services such as VMs, Logic Apps, Functions, SQL databases, etc.

Let's take a look at a couple of most common ones.

Azure Virtual Machines:

This dashboard is powered by Azure Monitor metrics for virtual machines. To see the whole list of metrics you can plot for a VM, see here.

Azure Resource Graph:

This one queries the Resource Graph to get subscription level data. To see what data you can get by querying the Resource Graph, see here.

Feel free to check out rest of the OOB dashboards and see what other metrics you can plot.

Creating your own dashboard

Hit the + button on a new dashboard to create a tile. You'll be greeted with this screen.

This screen lists out the other data streams you've got installed in your workspace and a list of data streams you recently used. For now, let's select the Azure data source.

This takes us to the list of data streams available for Azure. As you'll notice, there are quite a few of different data streams available. Some of the most popular ones include Cost – which fetches costs for selected scope, Monitor Metric – fetches the list of Azure monitor metrics for selected resource type, KQL – lets you run a KQL query against your Log Analytics Workspaces, and a bunch of other useful data streams like Alerts, Reservations, preset perf counters, etc.

You can read more about the cost dashboards here.

For now, let's select the Monitor Metric data stream and see what we get here.

Next, we select the objects we want to see the metric for. For this demo, I'll select an Azure function. You can filter down to the exact resource type you want from the filters panel on the left.

Next under Parameters, you'll notice you have a whole list of Azure metrics available for this resource type. To see what metrics are available for each resource type, see here.

I'll select Average Memory Working Set in this example and select a timeframe of 24 hours on the next screen.

Over the next Shaping and Columns screens, you can do some basic data manipulation/calculations. You can also perform advanced data analytics using the SQL Analytics function.

Choose the right data visualization on the right and with that we have our dashboard ready!

Next steps – Monitoring and notifications

SquaredUp monitoring makes it easy to turn our dashboard tiles into monitors, so that we can be alerted about changes. Let's set it up now. I'll set up monitoring for when the latest value of this metric crosses a threshold.

Switch over to Monitoring tab on the top right and toggle it on.

With these conditions, the monitor will trigger when the latest value of Average Working Memory Set crosses 300 MB.

Not only can I see this in SquaredUp, I can also set up Notifications to let me know if any alerts are raised so I can be aware anytime. They can be sent as an email, as an IM message or forward it over to any of your automation workflows.

If the monitor triggers, we can receive a notification by email, Slack, Teams or via any system that supports webhooks. Read our docs to learn more about monitoring.

Sharing

Sharing is very simple in SquaredUp. We just hit the share button and have the option of inviting a user to the workspace, or sharing just the dashboard via a link:

Get started with SquaredUp

From this point on, you can try out different data streams and queries to create dashboard of your dreams. In addition, we also have many other plugins including AWS, Azure DevOps, PowerShell and many others.

Sign up for free and experience the power of SquaredUp yourself!