Add the azure dashboard blog post

_posts/2017-08-13-customizing-azure-dashboard.md

@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "Making the Azure Dashboard Useful with Markdown"
+tags:
+- azure
+---
+
+Azure has started to grow on me. I could imagine myself, a couple years ago,
+lamenting their poor non-Windows support, clumsy user interfaces (and APIs),
+and overall "beta dog" performance. Fortunately for cloud users like myself,
+Microsoft is **hungry**, and has heavily invested in Azure, becoming _very_
+competitive in a very short amount of time. One aspect of Azure I didn't expect
+to like however, was their web UI. If you're already familiar with the AWS web
+dashboard, you're probably accustomed to...low expectations, so just about any
+web interface designed later than 2008 would be an improvement in comparision.
+Fortunately for me (and you if you use Azure), the Azure "blade UI" was
+designed more recently, and was clearly created by a team of thoughtful UI
+designers rather than engineers.
+
+The first landing page for any Azure user, before they navigate into the
+"blades", is the Azure Dashboard. Unlike the AWS dashboard/home page, theAzure
+Dashboard is customizable, insofar that you can add and arrange pre-defined
+"tiles" to your heart's content. When I first started to use Azure, I made my
+best Liz Lemon eye-roll: "wow, I can rearrange clock tiles, how novel." Then I
+discovered one little feature, which I began to abuse almost immediately: the
+**Markdown** tile.
+
+![Markdown is fine](/images/post-images/azure-dashboard/markdown-is-fine.png)
+
+Most infrastructure folks have graphs in Graphite, or another data provider,
+which give them additional useful summarized information. Personally, I have
+information from Jenkins, which I would like to always be present. Since
+Markdown supports embedding images, as you can see above, any service which can
+generate an image asset, can provide information into the Azure Dashboard.  In
+the realm of Jenkins, I recommend the [Embeddable Build Status
+plugin](https://plugins.jenkins.io/embeddable-build-status) which can generate
+helpful little badges for any Freestyle Job, or Pipeline.
+
+As a nice side-effect, this isn't limited to "public" services, if your web
+browser can resolve the image URL, such as those on internal corporate
+services, then the Dashboard will render it appropriately.
+
+![My full dashboard](/images/post-images/azure-dashboard/full-dashboard.png)
+
+
+I hope whoever thought of adding the Markdown tile received a raise for their
+ingenuity since it's the difference between the Azure Portal's home page being
+an annoying interstitial page and an infrastructure home page which I rely on
+as a high-level overview.
+
+### Adding the tile
+
+Assuming you're already using Azure, adding the tile is supremely easy:
+
+* From the Azure Dashboard, click **Edit dashboard**.
+* Drag the "Markdown" tile into the Dashboard.
+* Edit the Markdown to include images and other useful information.
+* Profit!
+
+![Adding the tile](/images/post-images/azure-dashboard/adding-the-tile.png)