What is AWS Quicksight?

What are the benefits of using QuickSight?

What native AWS service integrations does QuickSight provide?
Amazon QuickSight provides various robust security features to safeguard data and meet compliance standards. These features include role-based access control, which allows organizations to define specific permissions for different users based on their roles within the system. Integration with Active Directory allows for seamless user management and authentication processes. CloudTrail auditing helps monitor and track user activity within QuickSight for enhanced security and accountability. The platform also supports single sign-on for easier and more secure access management.

QuickSight offers the ability to set up private VPC subnets, which create an additional layer of network isolation and data protection. Data backup functionality ensures that valuable insights and information remain secure and accessible in case of unexpected data loss scenarios. QuickSight complies with industry standards, including FedRamp, HIPAA, PCI PSS, ISO, and SOC, demonstrating its commitment to strict regulatory requirements.

The platform incorporates row-level security, enabling dataset owners to control access at a granular level based on the specific permissions associated with individual users interacting with the data. This feature enhances data protection by restricting access to sensitive information only to authorized personnel, thereby minimizing the risk of unauthorized data exposure.

How does QuickSight enable self-service BI for end users?
QuickSight enables self-service BI for end users through its Q feature. Users can ask simple questions without requiring BI training, allowing them to delve deep into data and obtain insights without extensive technical knowledge.

What ML integrations does QuickSight offer for insights?
QuickSight offers ML integrations for insights, such as Anomaly Detection, which analyzes data in real time for anomalies and variations. It also allows users to forecast business metrics and run interactive what-if scenarios using machine learning capabilities.

One key feature is the inclusion of customized auto-narratives that provide context-sensitive insights, enabling users to understand the data clearly and concisely. Additionally, users can access ML-powered anomaly detection to monitor their data for unusual patterns and outliers continuously. The platform also offers ML-powered forecasting capabilities, allowing users to predict key business metrics.

Does QuickSight offer mobile access?
QuickSight offers mobile access through its iOS, Android, and mobile web applications. This allows users to access and interact with data on the go, providing flexibility and convenience.

Can QuickSight send customized email reports and alerts to end users?
QuickSight can send customized email reports and alerts to end users. This feature allows users to receive relevant updates and insights directly in their inbox.

How does QuickSight enable the creation of customizable dashboards?
Amazon QuickSight provides a pixel-perfect dashboard design, allowing users to create customized, use-case-specific dashboards. In addition, the platform offers drag-and-drop interactivity, making it easy for users to build and customize visuals regardless of their experience level. Users can choose from various visualizations, including charts, graphs, tables, and maps, to create compelling and informative dashboards. Moreover, Amazon QuickSight Embedded Analytics themes allow users to customize visualizations according to personal preferences and business needs, such as changing colors or adding labels for improved readability. These features ensure users can easily tailor their visuals to meet specific requirements and create visually appealing and effective dashboards.

Can QuickSight combine data from different sources to build complex data models?
QuickSight allows users to combine data from various sources and build complex models. This enables governed data sharing and the creation of comprehensive data models for analysis.

What is SPICE in-memory storage and how does it enable simultaneous data exploration?
SPICE in-memory storage is a feature of QuickSight that allows thousands of users to explore data simultaneously. It stores data in memory for faster retrieval and analysis, enabling efficient data exploration.

Amazon QuickSight ​leverages the SPICE engine by blending columnar storage and in-memory technologies. Data within SPICE is retained until manually deleted by the user, ensuring data persistence. Additionally, SPICE automatically duplicates data to enhance availability and facilitate seamless scalability within QuickSight. Enabled by the SPICE engine, QuickSight can handle data sets of up to 250 million rows and 500 gigabytes, providing robust support for processing and analyzing large volumes of data effectively.

How does QuickSight enable users to connect to various data sources?
QuickSight lets users connect to their entire data set in AWS, third-party clouds, or on-premises. It provides the capability to connect to different data sources. It offers native AWS service integrations with services like AWS Redshift, Snowflake, Exasol, Amazon RDS, and others. It also provides private VPC connectivity for these services, ensuring secure and seamless data exploration.

It boasts compatibility with various data sources, including on-premises databases, APIs, IoT devices, CSV files, and SaaS applications. Users can also leverage QuickSight’s integration with different data storage services, such as Amazon S3, and its ability to query relational databases like those powered by Presto.  End-users can conveniently upload new data to an S3 bucket or file for enhanced data exploration through incremental data uploads.

Key Features

Amazon QuickSight is a powerful analytics service that offers business intelligence tools and data visualization capabilities for quick and efficient data analysis. By utilizing interactive dashboards and visualizations, QuickSight allows organizations to delve deep into their data to uncover actionable insights swiftly. This service can ingest data from various sources, including databases, files, and streaming data. Through its features and functionalities, Amazon QuickSight enables companies to make informed decisions by exploring data and identifying valuable insights that may have previously been hidden.

Its innovative QuickSight Q feature stands out, allowing users to ask conversational questions about their data. This feature uses a machine learning (ML) powered engine to provide relevant visualizations without authors and administrators needing time-consuming data preparation. Leveraging AWS’ machine learning expertise, QuickSight also offers advanced analytics capabilities. Users can uncover hidden insights, perform accurate forecasting and what-if analysis, and integrate easy-to-understand natural language narratives into their dashboards.

QuickSight facilitates self-service business intelligence for end users through its innovative ‘Q’ feature. This unique functionality empowers users to ask straightforward questions without requiring specialized BI training, enabling them to explore data deeply and extract valuable insights without requiring extensive technical expertise. By embracing self-service BI, QuickSight empowers users across the organization to make informed decisions efficiently and effectively.

User-Friendly

The platform features a drag-and-drop interface that allows users to create dashboards, visualizations and reports effortlessly. It’s designed for simplicity, so you don’t need advanced data science or programming skills to get started.

QuickSight also formats data by default, helping generate professional-quality visuals without investing time or resources into design or coding. It frees users to focus on analyzing information and utilizing machine learning insights.

This tool supports ten major languages, ensuring usability across various regions. Its accessibility via free iOS and Android apps makes it convenient for employees, whether they are at the office, traveling, or working remotely.

Quicksight Q

This is machine learning capabilities utilized to better allow Quicksight to understand queries and spit out relevant information in a legible format in an incredibly short time.  It already comes pre-trained with terms and data sets from a variety of industries so that it’s already primed to understand and regurgitate information relative to users’ intentions.  Finally, the longer users interact with Q, the better it becomes accustomed to the internal lingo of an organization and their inquiry habits.

Embedded Interactive Elements

The dashboard is highly customizable with many options to change the look and feel from coloring to font.  With just a single click, it’s incredibly easy to embed these tools into apps, wikis, and portals without the need to call embedding APIs.  The Enterprise Edition of Quicksight also sports the option to generate custom emails embedded with dashboard reports, including the header and the footer of the emails.  Furthermore, it’s capable of deeper insight with ad-hoc analysis and machine learning tools for anomaly detection, forecasting, and natural language queries.  Finally, the serverless architecture can be arranged to keep multiple end-users separate, moving dashboards between accounts, automating payments, and more.

Amazon QuickSight’s user interface is designed to be user-friendly and intuitive. At the core, the dashboard is the control center, offering quick access to visualizations, datasets, and essential features like sharing capabilities and customization options.
One of the standout features is its customization. Users can select different metrics and dimensions for each visualization, tailoring their dashboard to fit their unique needs. The drag-and-drop functionality further simplifies creating and adjusting visuals, making it accessible even for those without advanced design or coding skills.

ML (machine learning) Insights

Outliers and trends can very easily fall under the radar under tides of other data points.  ML Insights can continuously analyze all data gathered to find anomalous patterns and understand the causes.  With that, it can also establish accurate estimates for future business metrics.  These predictions are then woven into the dashboard with all of the necessary context to fully explain to the users along with controls to customize the story.

Built for Enterprise-scale Workloads

Quicksight scales automatically to compensate tens of thousands of users at any time without infrastructure or capacity to plan ahead.  Additionally, it can import from data sources either on-premises or in the cloud, including various SaaS applications.  Quicksight’s Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation Engine - also known as SPICE - automatically replicates data for multiple users to run analysis simultaneously.  It’s designed with being a global application in mind and is localized in ten major languages and is available in most AWS availability regions. Furthermore, Quicksight is designed as a global application, localized in ten major languages, and accessible in most AWS availability regions, ensuring a seamless user experience across diverse locations and languages.

Visual Sharing

Amazon QuickSight offers diverse options for sharing the visuals you create, ensuring flexibility and control.

Internal Sharing: Share your data visualizations within your organization with specific team members. You decide if they can view, edit, or download the visual content.

Embedding in Applications: Extend the reach by embedding these visuals directly into your websites or applications, making the data accessible to end-users seamlessly.

Permission Management: Manage access meticulously. You control who can interact with the visualizations and to what extent—whether they can only view, download datasets, or make edits.

Alerts and Notifications: Stay informed with alerts of significant data changes. This keeps your team and stakeholders updated with the latest insights.

Data Cleaning

In Amazon QuickSight, users begin by either connecting to a data source or uploading a file directly to the platform. This can include various sources, such as cloud storage or databases. Once the connection is established, users can refine and modify data sets further.

• Filtering: Remove unnecessary data points to focus on specific metrics.
• Pivoting: Rearrange and summarize data for better insight.
• Joining Tables: Combine multiple data sets to enrich the analysis.

After refining the data, users can delve deeper by generating visualizations, making it easier to extract meaningful insights. QuickSight supports sources using Amazon’s internal services, like S3, Redshift, and RDS. Alternatively, it can incorporate data sources not native to the AWS ecosystem, like MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Additional Features

Native AWS Integration

• • Private VPC connectivity for secure AWS access to Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Exasol, Amazon RDS, and more
  • Native IAM permissions for Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena with fine-grained access control for serverless data exploration
  • Amazon SageMaker integration allows easy integration of sophisticated ML models
    without complex data pipelines

Minimal Maintenance Required

• • Serverless architecture auto-scales to hundreds of thousands of users with high availability; no need to over-provision for peak usage
  • SPICE in-memory engine auto-scales to provide consistent fast response times for end-users and analysts; no need to scale databases for high workloads
  • Pay-per-session optimizes costs by only paying for actual usage; no need to buy thousands of end-user licenses for large-scale BI or embedded analytics

Cost and Pricing

AWS QuickSight provides a 30-day free trial for its Enterprise Edition to current customers, during which the typical monthly charge of $250 is not applied.

Standard Edition

• • $9/month with a yearly subscription or $12/month for each month individually
    • 10 GB/user of SPICE capacity
    • $0.25 per GB of extra capacity

Enterprise Edition

• • Authors - create and share dashboards with other users.

• • Readers - can explore dashboards, download data, and receive email reports.

Capacity Pricing

• • Reader Capacity is for hosting multiple Q sessions in tandem, making it ideal for mass deployments.

• • Q question Capacity

Anomaly Detection

SPICE usage