Azure Portal Overview
The Azure portal is a platform that allows us to access all our applications. This allows us to manage them in one place. We can create, manage, and monitor all applications, from simple web applications to complex cloud applications.
So, first of all, to log in to the Azure portal, we need to sign up. And, if we sign up for the first time, we will get 12 months of popular free services. And also, we will get a certain amount of free credit for 30 days. And on top of all these things, we will get some services that are free forever.
So make sure you’re fully prepared to try all the services before signing up for Azure, as this credit is only available for 30 days.
Creating an Azure account
Step 1: Open https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/
then click on Start free; you will go to the next step.
Step 2: You need to sign in with your Microsoft account. If you already have a Microsoft account, you can fill in the details and sign in. If you don’t have one, you need to sign up first to continue.
Step 3: After signing in to your Microsoft account, you will be redirected to the following page, as shown below. There, you will need to fill in the required fields. You will be asked for your credit card number to verify your identity. You will not receive any bills unless you upgrade to paid services.
Step 4: After filling all the details, you will be asked to verify the privacy and agreement. Check the box and then click on Sign up.
Step 5: You have created your free account and are now directed to the Azure homepage, as shown in the figure below. You can explore Azure services.
When you first sign in to Azure, the Azure portal looks like the image below. The home page displays the most popular tools and services.
Creating a resource
To create a resource, you can select any resource on the home page.
If you want to create another resource not present on the home page, you browse the navigation menu on the left of the screen.
If you can’t find the right resource in the navigation menu, you can click on “All Service”. The following window will appear with all the services available in Azure.
There is another way to create a resource. Click “Create Resource” and then type the name of the desired resource in the search field.
There is another way to create a resource. Click “Create Resource” and then type the name of the desired resource in the search field.
Resource Group
A container that holds related resources for an Azure solution. It can include all resources in the solution or only the resources you want to manage as a group. Resource groups are containers of resources that have a common lifecycle or share an attribute such as “all SQL servers” or “Application Attendance.”
Creating a Resource Group
Step 1: Hover your cursor over the “Resource Groups” button in the navigation drawer, then click “Create” in the window that appears.
Step 2: In the next window, you need to fill in the subscription type, resource group name, and region. Then, click review + create or next (to add tags).
Step 3: You are now on the Tags window, where you can create a tag to logically organize Azure resources by category. We need to give it a name and a value. Click Next
Step 4: Now you are on the “Review + Create” window, check the details shown below, if they are correct then click on “create”.
Step 5: You will be directed to the home page, and a notification will appear showing that the resource group is effective.
Step 6: Click Go to Resource group to display the resource group window.
Let’s take a quick look at the menu on this page, but keep in mind that it can be different for different resources. For example, the configuration setting will be different for VMs versus databases.
Resource Group Properties
1) Overview: In the overview, we can see all the resources that belong to that resource group and also some metadata of the resource groups such as the subscription it belongs to, the tags inherent to it, the deployments made, etc.
2) Activity Log: It provides the administrative activity data done on that particular resource. So, in this case, we are creating a resource group. So, we have a successful update resource. So, by clicking on it, we can see the metadata inherent to it, and by clicking on JSON, we can the operations done (see the figure below).
3) Access Control (IAM): If we want to delegate access to a resource to someone else, then we can assign a contributor or owner role to a resource group to someone. Details of this role-based access control can be found on the Security Services page of this tutorial.
4) Tags: We can assign tags to any resource in Azure to categorize them.
5) Events: Any events that occur in a particular resource group, we can subscribe to those events and do something with them. For example, a virtual machine starts or stops. In that case, we can capture the event and send an email to someone.
6) Deployment: We can see all the implementations that have taken place here.
7) Policies: We can create and view policies here.
8) Cost Management: We can see the cost of resources here.
9) Monitoring: We can set alerts, see metrics associated with this resource group, diagnostic parameters, etc.
Subscription
To view the subscription. Go to the search box and type subscription and click on “Subscription”, as shown in the figure below. You can see the subscribed services here.
We have a free trial subscription here. See the figure below.
When you click on the subscription, you can view all the details including the subscription name, cost, ID, directory it belongs to, and billing period.
There is an integrated management portal, which we need to see.
This is a portal where we can see all the subscriptions we have.
So here we can see that we have a free subscription. If we click on Free Trial, we can see all the costs we have incurred, and we can see the billing history, and we can also set alerts. For example, if the cost exceeds a certain limit, we will be alerted.
And on the right tile below, we have options to manage payment methods, download usage details, contact Microsoft support and change subscription details, change subscription details, change address, change partner, etc.
