VSTS Copy Dashboard Tool

In this blog, I am going to talk about VSTS Copy Dashboard tool. This tool helps to replicate/copy the dashboards from one team to single or multiple teams in same VSTS account or another.
Assume we had setup nice Dashboards with widgets and charts using all custom work item queries, widgets on Build, Release Definitions, code, and sprint related charts etc. Setting up such kind of dashboards will take lot of time and effort and its little creative job 😊.
Now let’s say we have do it again for other Team Projects or Teams in same Project, huh it would be frustrating. VSTS Copy Dashboard comes to our rescue, this tool/app reads the dashboard(s) we have setup and replicates to multiple Teams & Projects in one go, isn’t it wonderful! Yes, Canarys a Microsoft DevOps Consulting company has developed this tool to help VSTS users to copy what they have done in one Project/Team to any other projects/teams provided it follows same process methodology and contains certain basic pre-requisites. And I remind you this feature has been asked multiple times in VSTS User Voice. So let us see how to use this.

To access the tool, browse to the VSTS Marketplace and search for the Copy Dashboard. You should see as shown below to get started.

Once you click on 'Get Started' button, you will get a login page as shown below:

Sign in with your VSTS Credentials i.e. Hotmail, outlook or your Organizational account.

Once you logged in with valid credentials, you will be redirected to account selection page where you can select VSTS Account and copy mode as shown below:

Currently the tool provides five modes of copying the dashboard as listed below:

1. Multiple teams within same team project

At present, only 1st one is enabled for the users and for others you need to request to tool owner to get access to below modes of copying dashboard.

1. Target multiple teams single team project within same VSTS account
2. Target multiple teams single team project but different VSTS account
3. Target multiple teams Different multiple team projects within same VSTS account
4. Target multiple teams Different multiple team project but different VSTS account

Upon selecting any of the four other modes you get a pop-up, select check-boxes for all the copy options you want and click on "I'm interested" button as shown below:

Once you get confirmation mail for other copy options, log in again and select the account and copy modes. Or you can continue with first option “multiple teams within same team project” without waiting for registration confirmation mail.
After selecting Account and mode click on continue button. You will see Source Selection and Target Selection. Under Source select the team project and Team from which you want to copy/replicate dashboard to other teams. Then select the Teams you wish to have this customized dashboard configured to. Then click on "Copy dashboard" button below.

After the dashboards are copied to all the target Teams you get a success message, and a link to VSTS Account. Navigate to your Teams and Projects to see the copied Dashboard. You should see the new Dashboard with all your widgets, charts in your Teams and Projects.

Just imagine if we have to reconfigure the dashboard, queries, charts, widgets etc. to all the 10,20,30 or more Teams or Projects. We would have spent days on this. The tool does for us in few minutes and it takes hardly 5 minutes of our time to carry out the steps rest tool will handle. That’s beauty of Microsoft VSTS API’s. Thanks to the developers of Copy Dashboard for making life easy for VSTS users.

Thanks for your time reading this post.

Regards,

Nagaraj

VSTS VM's and HOL's for beginners

If anyone wants to try their hands on VSTS/TFS can refer below labs by Microsoft.

These labs/VM's will give you ready made infrastructure and learning materials to quickly understand the concepts and features available in VSTS/TFS. Whether you are .Net developer or Java or Azure developer these labs should be of greater help to kick start your Microsoft DevOps journey using Microsoft product family.

To learn more  about the on-premise tool Team Foundation Server refer below URL:
TFS Labs

You can access the above labs using Microsoft TechNet Virtual Labs also. This provides a quick and easy way to evaluate and test Microsoft’s newest products and technologies through virtual environments that do not require any complex setup or installation. You can use virtual labs online immediately for free :)
TFS Virtual TechNet Labs

To learn more about the SaaS offering of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services aka VSTS (famously called TFS on cloud):
VSTS Labs

If you are Java developer and wondering how Microsoft products can help achieve ALM/DevOps for your Java application development, refer below lab:
Java Labs


If you are in need of any training or help on DevOps, VSTS, TFS or Azure you can contact me: nagrajbec@gmail.com

Thanks for your time reading this post.

Regards,

Nagaraj