Azure Portal Overview: Navigating the Azure Web Console

What the Azure Portal Is

The Azure portal lives at portal.azure.com. After you sign in with a Microsoft account or a work/school account that has access to an Azure subscription, you land on a customizable home page that shows your recently visited resources and a set of common service shortcuts.

Every action you perform in the portal — creating a virtual machine, adjusting a firewall rule, reading a log — translates into a REST call to the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) API. This means the portal is not a separate system from the CLI. A storage account created in the portal and a storage account created with az storage account create are identical objects, managed by the same backend.

Understanding this equivalence helps you switch confidently between the portal and the CLI. Use whichever is faster for the task at hand. See Using Azure CLI for a comparison of when each tool makes sense.

Key Areas of the Portal

The Home Page and Left Navigation Bar

When you first open the portal you see either the Home view or a Dashboard, depending on your settings. The left sidebar contains shortcuts to common services — Virtual Machines, Storage Accounts, Resource Groups — and a link to All services, which lists every Azure service in alphabetical order and by category. You can star any service in All services to pin it to the sidebar for fast access.

The Top Search Bar

The search bar at the top of the portal is one of its most useful features, and many people underuse it. It does three things at once:

• Finds services by name. Type “Key Vault” and you get a direct link to create a Key Vault or browse existing ones.
• Finds your specific resources. Type the name of a specific storage account or virtual machine you already created, and the portal shows it as a result you can click directly.
• Finds documentation and Marketplace items. If no resource matches, results include relevant documentation articles and Azure Marketplace offerings.

In practice, using search is almost always faster than navigating through the sidebar categories, especially once you have dozens of resources. Muscle memory for the search bar pays off quickly.

Resource Groups View

The Resource Groups page lists all the resource groups in your current subscription. Clicking a resource group shows every resource inside it — VMs, disks, network interfaces, storage accounts, and so on — along with their types, locations, and tags. This makes it easy to see everything that belongs to a particular project in one place.

From inside a resource group you can delete the entire group with one click, which deletes all contained resources. This is useful when cleaning up after experiments, but be careful: the deletion is permanent. See Azure Resource Hierarchy for how resource groups fit into the broader structure.

Notifications Bell

The bell icon in the top bar shows status updates for recent operations. When you start creating a VM the portal initiates a deployment. The bell shows you when the deployment completes, whether it succeeded, and a link to the deployment details if something went wrong. Long-running operations like large disk copies also show progress here.

Cost Management + Billing

The Cost Management section (search for “Cost Management” in the top bar) shows your current spending, billing history, and forecasted costs. You can break costs down by resource, resource group, tag, or service type. This is the first place to check when a bill looks unexpectedly high.

Setting up a budget alert in Cost Management is one of the first things to do on a new subscription. See Monitoring Your First Azure Subscription for a step-by-step guide to doing this.

Azure Advisor

Advisor (search for “Advisor” in the top bar) analyzes your resources and gives recommendations in five categories: Cost, Security, Reliability, Operational Excellence, and Performance. For new subscriptions, the Security recommendations are worth checking early. For established subscriptions, the Cost recommendations often identify idle VMs or underutilized reserved instances.

Pinning Resources to Your Dashboard

The Azure portal supports multiple named dashboards, which are customizable grids of tiles. Each tile shows information about a specific resource, metric, or Azure service. Dashboards are stored as JSON in a resource group, so they can be shared with team members who have the right access.

To pin a resource to a dashboard:

1. Navigate to the resource (find it via search or through its resource group).
2. Look for the pin icon next to the resource’s name in the top area of its blade, or click the three-dot menu on any metric chart and select “Pin to dashboard”.
3. Choose an existing dashboard or create a new one.
4. Rearrange tiles by dragging them to the position you want.

A practical pattern is to create one dashboard per project or environment. Pin the resource group overview, key metrics (CPU for VMs, request count for App Services), and the Cost Management spending chart for that resource group. When you open the portal, you immediately see the health of your workload without navigating anywhere.

Creating a Resource from the Portal

The most common way to create a new resource from the portal is through the Create a resource button (the plus icon in the left sidebar or on the home page). This opens the Azure Marketplace, where you search for a service type — “Storage account”, “Virtual network”, “Azure Kubernetes Service” — and then step through a guided creation form.

Resource creation forms in the portal are organized into tabs: Basics, Networking, Security, Tags, Review + Create. On the Basics tab you choose the subscription, resource group, region, and name. The form validates your input and shows errors inline before you submit. The final “Review + Create” tab summarizes every setting and shows an estimated cost where applicable.

The “Automation” and “Download a Template” Button

At the bottom of many resource creation forms and on existing resources, you will find a link labeled Download a template for automation or similar. This exports the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template JSON that corresponds to the current configuration. It is a useful way to learn what a Portal action looks like as code, and you can use the downloaded template as the basis for repeatable deployments.

Portal vs CLI — When to Use Each

Both tools interact with the same Azure backend, so the choice is about workflow and repeatability, not capability.

Use the portal when:

• You are learning a new service and want to see all the configuration options laid out visually.
• You are doing a one-time or exploratory action where writing a script is more effort than it saves.
• You want a quick visual health check of a workload — charts, alerts, resource states.
• You need to walk someone else through a setup step in a way they can follow on screen.

Use the CLI when:

• You are repeating an action across multiple resources or subscriptions.
• You want an auditable, version-controlled record of what you deployed.
• You are automating deployments in a CI/CD pipeline.
• You prefer working in a terminal and find clicking through forms slow.

Many teams use a hybrid approach: explore and prototype in the portal, then codify the final configuration in the CLI or infrastructure-as-code before deploying to production. See Using Azure CLI and Azure Cloud Shell for CLI-focused guidance.

Portal Settings Worth Knowing

Switching Subscriptions and Directories

If your account has access to multiple Azure subscriptions or multiple Microsoft Entra ID directories (tenants), you switch between them using the Directories + subscriptions filter in the top bar (the icon looks like a funnel or directory). The subscription selector determines which subscription all portal operations target by default. This is the portal equivalent of az account set —subscription.

A common confusion for new users: if you cannot see a resource you know exists, check that the correct subscription is selected. Resources are siloed by subscription, so viewing the wrong one shows a blank list.

Language and Appearance

Under Settings (gear icon in the top bar) you can set the portal language, regional format (for date and currency display), and color theme including a dark mode. These are stored per user account, not per browser, so they follow you across devices.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The portal has a small set of keyboard shortcuts. Pressing G then B navigates to the home page. Pressing / focuses the search bar. Pressing ? opens the full list of shortcuts. If you use the portal heavily, learning the search shortcut alone saves meaningful time over a week of work.