Introduction
AWS QuickSight is a business analytics service that helps you get business insights from your data. You can basically build business visualizations to make decisions. It is an easily scalable, serverless service which is integrated with ML-powered business intelligence. You can configure it to connect to data sources like S3, RDS, DynamoDB, and Redshift and also external sources such as Salesforce, making the service a facilitator for your central analytics.
This diagram by AWS would help you understand better on how AWS Quicksight works as a service:
How does AWS Quicksight work?
Firstly, you need to sign up for AWS Quicksight on your management console, where you will need to enter your account details and region selections. You will be prompted to choose a standard or enterprise edition next. If you are starting a beginner, standard edition would be perfect for you. As the first user of Quicksight, you get 1 GB free SPICE base free. Next, you need to choose data sources, but before you do so, make sure AWS Quicksight has permissions to access all the data sources you are about to choose. You can simply achieve this by providing an IAM role to Quicksight to access your desired services.
Remember that you can even upload an external file which supports .csv, .tsv, .clf, .elf and .xlsx files. Next, you simply specify what portions of the files, and what visual representations you want to see, and Quicksight does the rest for you. Here are the options of visuals you can specify:
For example, if you select a bar chart for the certain data you put in, here is the output visualization (example chart from AWS):
That is how you can leverage AWS Quicksight to quickly visualize and assess what is going on in your AWS environment and make important decisions to further enhance your architecture.
Key Features
- Serverless: Quicksight does not need the managing of servers or infrastructure, as it is a serverless service.
- Cost effective: The pricing model for Quicksight is Pay-per-Session pricing, making it the most cost effective.
- ML Insights: As the service is backed by ML, you can cover hidden trends and analyze outliers more efficiently.
Benefits of Integrating QuickSight with AWS Infrastructure
- Central analysis platform: You can basically consolidate data coming from various AWS services as sources for comprehensive analysis.
- Real-Time Insights: Quicksight is considered to be one of the fastest business analytics services, hence optimizing your use case of quick and valuable analysis.
- Sharable insights: Quicksight provides you with the feature to share insights internally within your organization for better collaboration.
- Scalability: Quicksight automatically scales to accommodate the size and complexity of your data.
Use Cases
- Business Reporting: You can create comprehensive business reports from data sources, i.e, defined AWS services.
- Data Exploration: ML-powered insights enable advanced data exploration and analysis.
- Real-time Analytics Dashboards: You can build and share real-time analytics dashboards.
- Embed analytics in applications: Quicksight has also made embedding of interactive dashboards directly into your applications easier for enhanced user experience.
To better understand the use case, here is a demonstration of a dashboard by AWS Quicksight (that I found on an article in medium):
Best Practices for QuickSight Integration
- Data source optimization: You need to regularly optimize your AWS data sources (S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Redshift) for better and accurate insights in QuickSight.
- Leverage ML insights: You can utilize QuickSight’s machine learning capabilities to uncover deeper insights.
- Regularly update dashboards: You should keep your dashboards up-to-date with the latest data and insights.
- User experience enhancement: The design of the dashboards should be easy to understand and comprehensible for end-users.
Conclusion
Integrating AWS QuickSight into your AWS infrastructure opens up a world of possibilities for data analysis and business intelligence. It simplifies the process of data visualization and also allows access to real-time insights. Whether you’re a small startup or a large enterprise, AWS QuickSight can significantly enhance your data analytics capabilities, driving better business decisions and fostering a data-driven culture.