Dashboard - At-a-glance Overview of Azure Resources

The Dashboard is a tiled overview that surfaces the state of your Azure resources without drilling into individual explorer tabs. It’s useful as a landing page when you open a subscription — check DLQ depths, spot unusual queue counts, and jump straight into whichever resource needs attention.

Opening the dashboard

The dashboard is a tab kind, same as Blob / Service Bus / Key Vault. Add it to your startup config:

{
  "tabs": [
    { "kind": "dashboard", "subscription": "your-subscription-id" }
  ]
}

Or open one at runtime with the command palette (Ctrl+P) → New Tab: Dashboard.

Widgets

The dashboard shows four widgets tiled in a grid:

Widget	Shows	Sortable by
Namespace counts	Message counts per Service Bus namespace — queues, topics, active and dead-letter totals	Namespace, Queue count, Topic count, Active messages, DLQ messages
DLQ alerts	Entities with dead-letter messages; each row drills directly into that entity’s DLQ pane	DLQ count (default), Namespace, Entity
Most used · Blob	Your most-touched Blob accounts and containers, ranked by cumulative drill-in count from the persistent usage table	Uses, Resource, Kind
Most used · Service Bus	Your most-touched namespaces, queues, and topic subscriptions, same ranking	Uses, Resource, Kind

Each widget header carries a short context line:

• Namespace counts → 312 total (or 11 visible · 312 total while a filter is active)
• DLQ alerts → 5 · 1 240 msgs (or all clear when no DLQ has messages)
• Used widgets → last 7d

Widgets auto-refresh their counts every 30 seconds. They share a single cache broker so the data is also available instantly to the matching explorer tab.

Color coding

Numeric cells use a three-tier scale. Counts (queues / topics) warn at 50 and turn pink at 200; live message backlogs warn at 1 000 and turn pink at 5 000; DLQ counts warn at 100 and turn pink at 1 000. Zero is muted. Used widgets shade the top-quartile rows warm and pink-highlight the leader.

Spatial navigation

Unlike the resource tabs, which use a linear pane focus cycle, the dashboard uses spatial navigation — each widget is a tile and you move between them like moving around a grid.

Vim (default)

Key	Action
Ctrl+H / Alt+H	Focus widget to the left
Ctrl+J / Alt+J	Focus widget below
Ctrl+K / Alt+K	Focus widget above
Ctrl+L / Alt+L	Focus widget to the right
Tab	Cycle to the next widget

Standard

Key	Action
Alt+Left / Alt+H	Focus widget to the left
Alt+Down / Alt+J	Focus widget below
Alt+Up / Alt+K	Focus widget above
Alt+Right / Alt+L	Focus widget to the right
Tab	Cycle to the next widget

Scrolling within a widget

Each widget has its own row cursor and scroll offset. The keys below move the row cursor; the view scrolls to keep it visible.

Vim (default)

Key	Action
j / Down	Scroll down one row
k / Up	Scroll up one row
gg	Jump to top (chord — press g twice)
G / End	Jump to bottom
Ctrl+D / PgDown	Half-page down
Ctrl+U / PgUp	Half-page up

Standard

Key	Action
Down / j	Scroll down one row
Up / k	Scroll up one row
Home	Jump to top
End / G	Jump to bottom
PgDown	Half-page down
PgUp	Half-page up

Drilling into a resource

Press o (or Enter) on a row to open the matching explorer with that resource already selected. For example, pressing o on a DLQ alert row opens a Service Bus tab navigated directly to that entity’s dead-letter pane. Topic-subscription rows in Most used · Service Bus likewise open into their DLQ pane, matching the dashboard’s “fix-the-problem” framing. The same action is also reachable through the action menu (a → “Open in…”).

This works through the same pending-navigation path the jump list uses — if the target tab’s cache is warm the switch is instant; otherwise it fetches just what’s needed to land you on the right pane.

Filtering

Press / (Ctrl+F in the standard keymap) to open a substring filter for the focused widget. Type to refine, Enter accepts (the filter persists in the title bar as filter: <text>), Esc clears it (while typing or after it has been applied). The filter is per-widget and doesn’t survive a refresh of the underlying data.

Widget actions

Each widget exposes a small action menu — open it with a while the widget is focused. Direct keybinds work without opening the menu:

Key	Action	Widgets
o	Open in matching explorer tab	All
s	Open sort picker	All (widgets that expose SortFields)
x	Clear usage stats for this widget	Used · Blob / Used · Service Bus

The action menu shows only the actions relevant to the focused widget. Navigate with j/k, Enter or o confirms, Esc cancels. Pressing the direct keybind (e.g. s) while the menu is open also fires the matching action and closes the menu.

Refresh

Note

The dashboard auto-refreshes its widgets every 30 seconds, so you usually don’t need to refresh manually. Press r to force an immediate refresh of the entire dashboard.

Fetch errors surface as error toasts and land in the notification history (N, or Ctrl+N in the standard keymap) — they aren’t confined to the widget footer, so a failed background refresh is visible even if you’ve switched away.

Jump list

Dashboard positions aren’t individually recorded in the jump list (widgets don’t have a deep navigational structure), but opening a dashboard tab and drilling out into a resource tab are both tracked. You can Ctrl+O back to the dashboard after drilling into an entity from a DLQ alert.

See Navigation for details.