I an administrator of a large corporate Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS) instance where we manage our application lifecycle management process. We have hundreds of 'teams' within our main collection project; and each team has 1-5 dashboards for reporting their velocity, status, activity, etc. We're attempting to (somewhat) standardize the dashboards and widgets on them; and any new teams dashboards within our 'mega' project when it's created. Has anyone had any success in doing this, or atleast setting a standard default dashboard(s) when a new team is created? THanks!
You can create a "Template Dashboard" with all your default widgets and in another teams create a copy of the dashboard with the "VSTS Copy Dashboard" tool.
The VSTS Copy Dashboard tool helps overcome cumbersome process of replicating dashboards within multiple teams of the same VSTS project. It requires you to sign-in to your VSTS account, select the team project, choose the team with preset dashboard and then choose either single or multiple teams to which the dashboards have to be copied.
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Does this exist?
I have 10 team projects in Azure DevOps, each with 2 to 5 pipelines (using multi-stage yaml pipelines, not classic Release pipelines).
Is there any widget or built in functionality to see a dashboard of all of my pipelines across all projects with red/green status? Thinking to create a PowerBI report if not...
Dashboards are specific to the Team Project. There still is no such thing as an Organization level dashboard (See earlier questions: Is there a way to create an organization dashboard in Azure DevOps?)
The current "User Voice" topic for this request is here: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/idea/365500/single-dashboard-for-multiple-projects.html
The best option outside of Power BI is creating a dashboard per team and then tagging each as a favorite. They are then accessible via the favorites shortcut in the top navigation.
A few years ago, our team made the full transition to Azure DevOps. Before that, we had a mixture of on-prem TFS and Subversion but went to the Azure DevOps as it was easier to maintain project status between our developer and BA teams. At that time, for each project the team was working on, we just created a new "project" in Azure DevOps, but over the course of the past few years, we have found that using that method doesn't lend itself to helping us track metrics across all of those projects. We also see that maintaining multiple, separate backlogs is not ideal as we have developers spread across multiple sprints at the same time in different projects without a single place for the team leads or scrum master to fully know what their team members are working on in a single day.
Now, we've made use of queries, but those only go so far, so we've made the decision to merge our projects into a single "project". My scrum master and I have been looking at Naked Agility's merge tool, as outlined in this link: https://blog.devopsabcs.com/index.php/2019/06/12/one-project-to-rule-them-all/.
Has anyone used this tool and how well did it work for you? Also, are there any other options for merging projects together as this tool seems really complex (which the developer states is the case).
Azure DevOps: Merging two projects together
Sorry for any inconvenience.
I am afraid merging projects into a project is currently not supported in azure devops.
There is a Under Review user voice about make it possible to move a Team Project between Team Project Collections.
Merging two projects is not a simple task, it contains not only source code, build/release history, workitems and other watch outs were mainly around access and security:
External API integrations such as Web Apps, Function Apps, JIRA, Service Now
External inbound app authorisations
External outbound app authorisations such as Azure Service Principals
Variable Group authorisations to YAML Build Pipelines
Library reference updates including KeyVault
etc
This refactoring ended up being much more work than the code merge itself.
Besides, there is a Azure devops extension Migration Tools for Azure DevOps, which allow you to migrate Teams, Work Items, and Plans & Suits from one Project to another in Azure DevOps/TFS both within the same Organisation, and between Organisations. Watch the Video Overview to get you started in 30 minutes. This tool is complicated and its not always easy to discover what you need to do.
Hope this helps.
My company creates a lot of projects in Azure DevOps, and they all have the same structure -- same members, same permissions. Each project has different Git repositories within it, but that's the only thing (other than the name) that differs between them. It would be helpful to have a template so that everything is set up correctly each time we need a new one.
I don't see a way to do this through the web interface. I have the sense that I could probably do it with a script, but I don't know where to begin with that (including which tool to use). Where should I start?
It looks like there is now a way to do this without the Azure DevOps CLI (as long as your project that you want to template is one of the supported types (Agile, Scrum and Basic)). There is a tool available here that will step you through the process.
There is also an excellent blog post here that gives you an overview.
Yes, you can accomplish most of the configuration by script. For the beginning you might take a look at the Azure Devops CLI, which allows you to perform several actions on Azure Devops, like:
Create projects, Users and configure security
Create repositories, pipelines and set branch permissions
Create and manage work items
...
I am having multiple logic apps in resorce group.How can i copy all and deploye to different RG.
what is best way to do so?
I am not prefering Moving resorces.
As an example, you can download all of the logic apps to visual studio, from there create parameter files and build Azure DevOps build/release pipelines to different resource groups. Such as dev, test, uat & prod resource groups. I am using this strategy to build and govern over 300 logic apps for one of my customers. Now I started from Visual studio but you could easily download your current logic apps using the cloud explorer in visual studio or directly from the Azure portal.
One of the things you will have to look out for is the API-connections, they tend to create new ones even when not asked for.
I am using Visual Studio Team Services.
Part of Release Management is allowing users to approve a deployment environment or not. I have noticed that the list of approvers can only be of people added to VSTS. Is it possible to have approvers who are not added to VSTS.
I want to have the tracking of their inputs for approving, but they don't have any interest in seeing user stories, source code, etc.
If you don't want people to have access to work items and source code, restrict their access by defining security groups and adding them to these groups.
Yes — they will need at least a basic licence.
You can add the specific approver with a basic licence, then use the security settings to add them to either the approver group or give them specifically approval rights. (More info.)
You can also specify account (user) groups as approvers. When a group is specified as an approver, only one of the users in that group needs to approve in order for the release to move forward. If you are using Visual Studio Team Services, you can use local groups managed in Team Services or Azure Active Directory (AAD) groups if they have been added into Team Services. If you are using Team Foundation Server (TFS), you can use local groups managed in TFS or Active Directory (AD) groups if they have been added into TFS.