Azure Portal – Create Refreshing Big Screen Dashboard

One thing that was bugging me for quite some time, how can we make our Azure portal dashboard usable on a big screen? As you might know I have a strong monitoring background and one thing that always comes up is, how to represent the monitoring data on a big screen.

The Azure portal provides an awesome capability to build dashboard in an easy one-click experience. Microsoft has a well-documented guide how to create such dashboards.

The problem up to now was in the Azure portal, when you created a new shiny dashboard to show your monitoring data, you could hit the Full Screen button…

…but as soon the browser refreshed the Azure portal navigation pane would appear and the dashboard would put back into the portal frame.

One workaround to this problem I would like to share in this blog post. Before we can start, make sure you have Google Chrome installed. Next, create an Azure portal dashboard as described in this article. I created just a dashboard with some metrics from my blog monitoring through Application Insights…

…next go to the settings and change the default view to dashboard. This will make sure when you login into the portal, that the dashboard will be the default page…

…then open a browser and login into the Azure portal, we see something like this…

…next download a refresh plugin like this here…

…now we can put everything together. Set the refresh interval to 10 seconds, press F11 in Chrome browser to remove the menu and tabs and then it will refresh as you can see in this animation (click on the picture so see the recording)…

Although this is not a perfect solution yet, because all the tiles posted to the dashboard will reload the data from its source and it can get a bit slow, but for as a quick monitoring overview on a big screen, I think it is pretty cool solution. Have fun .