Azure Dashboards and Workbooks

Collecting metrics and logs is only valuable if the right people can see and act on the data. Azure Dashboards provide at-a-glance operational views that update in real time and can be shared with the entire team in the Azure portal. Workbooks go further, enabling rich, parameterised, narrative reports that combine text, charts, grids, and live query results in a single scrollable document — ideal for weekly operations reviews or capacity planning.

An Azure Dashboard is a collection of tiles arranged on a canvas. Tiles can display metric charts, resource health, KQL query results, resource group overview, Markdown text, or App Service metrics. You can pin any chart from Metrics Explorer or a Log Analytics query directly to a dashboard using the Pin to dashboard button. Dashboards are stored as JSON resources in a resource group and support ARM-based deployment.

Azure Dashboards have two sharing modes. Private dashboards are visible only to you. Published (shared) dashboards are published as Azure resources in a resource group, where RBAC controls who can view or edit them. You can grant the Reader role on the dashboard resource to give read-only access. Note that if a dashboard tile queries data from a Log Analytics workspace, viewers also need Read access to that workspace.

Common dashboard tile types include: Metrics chart — plots one or more metric time-series from Metrics Explorer. Log Analytics query — runs a KQL query and shows the result as a table, chart, or number. Resource health — shows the Azure-reported health status of a specific resource. Markdown — renders static text, links, and images to provide context. Clock — shows UTC time, useful for globally distributed teams.

Azure Workbooks are interactive reports that combine data from multiple Azure sources — Azure Monitor metrics, Log Analytics KQL queries, Azure Resource Graph, and Application Insights. Unlike static dashboards, workbooks support parameters (time range pickers, resource selectors, dropdowns) that allow the same workbook to dynamically show data for the resource or time window chosen by the viewer.

Workbook parameters make reports interactive without requiring separate workbooks per resource. You can add a Time range parameter (standard Azure time picker), a Resource parameter (resource picker scoped to a subscription), or a Dropdown parameter populated by a KQL query. All subsequent query steps and visualisations automatically use the selected parameter values, updating in real time when the user changes a selection.

Each step in a workbook can display data as a Table, Time chart, Bar chart, Pie chart, Scatter plot, Grid with conditional formatting, Heatmap, or Tile (KPI cards). The grid visualisation supports column-level conditional formatting — for example, colouring cells red when failure rate exceeds a threshold — making it easy to highlight issues at a glance in an operational report.

Azure provides a large gallery of built-in workbook templates for common scenarios. VM performance templates show CPU, memory, disk, and network trends. App Service templates display request rates and failure percentages. Reliability templates plot availability against SLA targets. You can open any template, customise it, and save it as a new workbook under your subscription without starting from scratch.

Workbooks support linked drilldowns: clicking a row in one grid step can pass the selected row's values as parameters to a subsequent step, filtering a chart or table to show details for that specific item. This creates an interactive investigation flow — for example, clicking a failing endpoint in a summary table reveals a detailed trace list for only that endpoint, all within a single workbook page.

Both dashboards and workbooks are stored internally as JSON and can be exported for version control or deployment automation. Dashboard JSON can be downloaded from the portal's Edit mode and deployed via ARM templates. Workbooks export to a JSON format compatible with az monitor app-insights workbook CLI commands, allowing you to check workbook definitions into git alongside your infrastructure code.

Workbooks are read-only visualisation tools — they do not trigger alerts. To alert on data you display in a workbook, create a corresponding log search alert rule in Azure Monitor that runs the same KQL query. A best practice is to build your operational workbook first to validate the query logic visually, then copy the working KQL into an alert rule. This ensures what you monitor matches what you alert on.

Test your understanding of Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) concepts from this lesson.

In this lesson you learned: Azure Dashboards provide real-time at-a-glance tile views shareable across your team via RBAC, Azure Workbooks enable rich parameterised reports combining metrics, KQL queries, and Application Insights data, and both are stored as JSON and can be version-controlled and deployed via ARM. Next up we explore Azure Backup for protecting your workloads from data loss.