Probably you don’t know about the Kudu portal related with the Azure Web sites service. The truth is that it’s not announced in any way. This is a parallel portal that allows us to retrieve information from the server that is running your application, in order to diagnose your website and extend its capabilities. Many of the features offered through this website are already reflected on the new portal https://portal.azure.com/. In this post I’ll compare Kudu portal on Azure Web sites vs. new Azure portal.

First, let’s see how to access the Kudu portal. The only thing you need to do is to add the scm word in the URL like this:

In order to access this site you need to have your Azure credentials or deployment credentials. For the new Azure portal, go to http://portal.azure.com and select BROWSE> Websites > and choose the site you want to explore.

Once inside both sites, we can compare the different tabs:

• Environment: system information (OS version, number of processors, machine name, etc.), AppSettings, Connection strings associated with the deployment, environment variables, and so on. We have a menu to move between the different information:
  Today there is no such information on the new portal, although we can see in the Site settings section the Connection strings and App settings sections as well.
• Debug console: It enables us to launch commands on the machine. We can launch a CMD or Powershell console:
  In the new portal, you can access the console from the Operations section:

  

• Process explorer: It shows the processes that are running, even we can kill a process, get a memory dump, etc.:
  Like the previous paragraph we have the console in the Operations area where we are allowed only kill processes using the right button:
  
• Tools: We have several tools that allow us to download a memory dump, download the script deployment, Web hooks or access the web server log.
  In the new Azure portal, we have the log stream option (Streaming logs) for the server and the application, but today is not available to download memory dumps or web hooks:
  
• Site extensions: This is one of the most interesting parts of the site, allowing us to install and launch associated extensions to our website.
  For the new portal, the extensions are located in the Configuration section:

  

As you can see, we have a bunch of tools that can give us added value to serve web sites with more control to the developer for diagnosis and expanding the service functionality in a simple way. The most important features are already available to us in the new Azure portal, so I encourage you to take a look at the integration, since it is much more convenient than having to change between portals.

Hope this helps,

Cheers!