Not significant, but still wanted to share how to extend your Azure Portal Dashboard with custom content. This is a beneficial feature, which is somewhat unknown to many, for placing side notes and instructions.
Custom content how to
I’ve found that for smaller Azure based projects, documentation and noted tend to get lost a lot easier. Which once was the holy grail eventually ends up as “Oh, this document somewhere in SharePoint.” Therefore, having a place for keeping custom content such as notes or linking to existing documents can be very helpful.
Now, instead of talking, let’s create some custom content for our dashboard.
It’s all about Markdown
Within the Azure Portal, open your dashboard or create a new one. Enter edit mode by pressing on the edit dashboard located within the upper section of the window.
Within the Tiles Gallery, locate Markdown and drag it to the dashboard canvas.
Once places, you should see a six by four tiles large container with some sample content. Also, the Edit Markdown blade will be opened on the right. If this is not the case, click on the Edit button located within the container.
The container has three options for text entry; A title, Subtitle, and the most exciting part, called content. The content section supports Markdown, a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format.
You might already be familiar with Markdown, but if not, I would recommend checking the markup options available. You can find more details on the syntax on http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax.
Conclusion
I hope this was helpful for some of you. I’m using the custom context tile quite a lot, especially when sharing dashboards. There isn’t a lot of space available for annotations when creating shared dashboards. And using Markdown allows me to explain why and how a dashboard should be used.
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