With the classic Azure system management, you could previously manage only one resource on the Azure platform at the same time. But what about more complex applications, as are common today? The infrastructure of today's applications typically consists of several components—a virtual machine, a storage account, a virtual network, a web app, a database, a database server, or a third-party service. To manage such complex applications, with the first preview of the Azure Management Portal 3.0, the concept of resource groups was introduced.

You now no longer see your components as separate entities, but as related and interdependent parts of a single entity. So, you will be able to manage all the resources of your application simultaneously. As an instrument for this type of management, ARM (and ARM tools) was introduced.

Enough of the preliminary remarks. Let's take a look at ARM in detail with the following diagram:

As you can see in the preceding diagram, ARM can be accessed through a variety of different technologies and interfaces. These access options include the following:

• The traditional way, through the Azure portal (version 3.0 and newer)
• The script-based way, through Azure PowerShell (look for PowerShell modules with the AzureRM prefix) or through the Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI) (cross-platform CLI)
• For developers, through Visual Studio
• For developers, there are also SDKs available (.NET and some other programming languages) and, as with all Azure services, an extensive RESTful API

Let's go through the preceding diagram:

• It consists of one or more Azure resource groups and one or more Azure resources. An Azure resource group is a container (a management unit), that all of the resources of your Azure solution contain. The Azure resource is any form of manageable element available through Azure (for example, a virtual machine, a virtual network, and so on).
• The next section of the diagram is the layer with ARM—the Resource Provider (RP). A resource provider is an internal interface to the platform and offers you numerous operations to handle the resources you need. Each resource type has its own resource provider, for example, a compute resource provider (CRP), storage resource provider (SRP), or network resource provider (NRP).

Not shown in the diagram is the template functionality of the ARM. With a so-called ARM template (a text file based on JSON) you determine the details of the creation process of your resource groups or resources or about the configuration settings you require. Confused about the variety of items?

For this problem, there is a solution on the Azure platform available—Azure Resource Explorer.

Azure Resource Explorer is a tool for looking at your resources or at the resources of the Azure platform. By using this tool, you can see how the resources are structured and it enables you to view the properties of resources.

How can I find the Azure Resource Explorer? Follow these steps:

1. Open your Azure Management Portal at https://portal.azure.com.
2. In the portal, click on the All services option, as shown in the following screenshot:

3. In the list of services, search for Resource Explorer, and then click the Resource Explorer button:

4. In the Resource Explorer tab, you can find the following two nodes:
   • Providers: A list of all available resource providers from the Azure platform itself
   • Subscriptions: A list of resource groups, resources, and resource providers used by yourself:

5. By clicking the nodes, you can see the information you want:
   • In the first example for the Providers section, note the following:

• • In the second example for the Subscriptions section, note the following: