Having Azure Storage Accounts is likely one of the services that all Azure users are going to have, maybe VMs are among the next most popular services. For me, Azure Storage is my go-to and I’m always looking for better ways to administer and secure the resources in Azure.

Azure Storage Metrics and the Azure Mobile App are a good way to have visibility into the activity, size, count, latency and other metrics of an Azure Storage account with metrics being a stronger offering. Today, I’m going to install the Azure Storage Explorer to have some administrative access outside of the Azure portal. I still feel going into the Azure portal is a good thing; make no mistake. For one, you can run Azure Advisor on every visit to see new recommendations. Azure Storage Explorer is a quick download and easy install and I’m prompted to connect my Azure account:

Azure Storage Explorer post-installation.

The connection was straightforward and I was happy to see it supports the Multi-Factor Authentication. I was quickly logged into my Azure Storage accounts and then I do the first thing I always do, enable Dark Mode:

Hello Dark Mode My Old Friend….

Right away I found the Azure Storage Explorer very handy to navigate the contents and details of the existing storage accounts I have in place. So much so, I feel it is actually handier than the actual Azure Portal. Here is a few of me looking in an Azure file share, note the top “ribbon” of tasks, this was a very helpful set of commands for quick and easy storage account viewing:

Dark mode makes highlighted UI areas much awesomer.

I especially like the directory statistics (in particular for blobs) as it is a quick way to get count of items and size, which can be hard to do with blob storage.

The Azure Storage Explorer does not let you create, configure or remove Azure storage accounts; which is a good thing. That should be done in the Azure Portal anyways (if anything so you can run Azure Advisor first!). But you can launch directly to the Azure Portal when you want to do “action” tasks on a storage account:

Get down to business in the Azure portal if you need to!

And the best part is that it takes you directly to that storage account page in the Azure Portal, this is handy when you have many accounts to not have to re-browse to the resource in question.

Just a few minutes in, and I’m convinced. The Azure Storage Explorer will stay and is a great administrative hand for your Azure Storage day-to-day tasks such as adding data, removing data, getting statistics and cleanup.