Many Azure end users and developers have to deal with the challenges of holding multiple Microsoft and/or Azure Active Directory identities. At a minimum, you might be like me and have an MSDN account as well as a 1 or more corporate accounts. There may also be situations where you have development or test tenants and those use separate logins as well. Another use case is when doing testing and having different users with different roles (i.e. Admin users, basic user, user with no access, etc.) In these situations, it can be painful (or at least annoying) to switch contexts when using those identities on the web since web browsers can only log you into one identity at a time when using sites such as portal.azure.com. Have you ever gone to the Azure portal only to realize you last logged in with a different account and then you need to logout and back in with different credentials? This is a common situation for me, and although it only takes 10 seconds or so to login with different credentials, the frequency this happens makes it quite a hassle.
One solution is to use different browsers for different identities (i.e. one login in Firefox, one login in Chrome). This may work for 2 or 3 different identities, but it's not ideal since every browser will behave differently and may have different conventions.
The solution I use, which I will detail below is to utilize named profiles within Chrome, which allows for logging into as many identities as needed all at the same time. No more logout/login hassle!
Step-by-step Guide
Here are the steps to add additional profiles to Chrome:
- Within Chrome, click your named profile and select Manage people
- Click Add Person on the dialog
- Type a name for the profile, select an identifying icon if desired, check or uncheck creating a desktop shortcut and then save
- Repeat for as many profiles you wish to utilize. For example, I have my default which uses corporate production login, a secondary corporate development login as well as my MSDN/Microsoft login
- Now when you click on your profile, you have the option of opening a new window for each profile and each window maintains it's own set of cookies, browser history, etc.
- Here is an example of all 3 of my profiles being logged into the Azure portal all at the same time
Hope you find this useful!