In a previous post when I highlighted the Azure Advisor, a message that came up on login. The message for Azure Advisor was actually only one of the things that caught my eye on login. The other was an invitation (?) or note to try the Azure mobile app.

I decided to go ahead and give the Azure app (for Android) a look. I had a few goals with installing it. Primarily I wanted to know if it is useful and then identify what we can do with it. The app is available for Apple devices as well as Android devices and is shown below in the portal:

The app is suggested in the portal login screen.

I installed the app and was immediately happy (then I thought about it) that the MFA portal access applied to the mobile app. This is the MFA implementation when logging in to the Azure mobile app:

MFA on the mobile app. Hooray!

I had to think about this a bit as the MFA that I have implemented has been tied to my phone number (or to my email address associated with the portal). Both of the optional factors for MFA are accessible on this mobile phone, so this is a consideration. I’ll come back to this topic at the end of the blogpost.

When you log into the Azure mobile app, you are presented with a long list of all of the services you have in your account, There is a filter to show selected services instead of all of them in the mix in the view of the app. Here is all of the services for my account in the app as I log in:

The when any particular service is selected in the Azure app, the most beneficial thing the application does is show the activity for a particular service. Here is a storage account where I can see activity and metrics associated with the storage (this one is blob):

Hey blob storage account, what’s shaking? Azure Mobile App can tell.

The Azure App does include the ability also to run Azure Shell in the application. This is rather important because the mobile app’s “visual” elements are basically just a view to the services, there activity, their metrics, etc. The Azure Shell would be a mechanism to do more active tasks in the Azure portal, and is available on the mobile app. This is shown in the figure below:

Flip your phone, Azure App can handle that.

The above screenshot also highlights one of my favorite capabilities of the Azure app for Android, it can go to landscape mode. I dislike apps that don’t rote. This orientation makes sense for some views while landscape applies better to others. You can have your choice with the Azure app.

To the point of the post, should you use the Azure Mobile App? I think it is a handy way to have a quick look at your Azure resources, usage and utilization. From a security perspective, part of me wishes it did not have full power and capability (provided by the Azure shell) as if the phone device is compromised – the MFA is implemented there. But we should be using Mobile Device Management anyways.

Have you installed the Azure Mobile App? What do you like about it? Share your comments below.