Amazon QuickSight

• Business analytics and visualizations in the cloud

• Fast, easy, cloud-powered business analytics service

• Allows all employees in an organization to:

  • Build visualizations off of data

  • Geared towards a more general audience and not so much for developers

  • Perform ad-hoc analysis on datasets

  • Quickly get business insights from data

  • Anytime, on any device (browsers, mobile)

• Serverless

  • Analysts don't need to manage their own servers.

QuickSight Data Sources

Quick sight can connect to a wide variety of data sources,

• Redshift Data warehouse

• Aurora / RDS

• Athena

• EC2-hosted databases

• Files (S3 or on-premises)

  • Excel

  • CSV, TSV

  • Common or extended log format

• Data preparation allows some limited ETL

  • E.g., changing field names, data types, some calculated columns etc.

SPICE - Making QuickSight Fast

• Data sets are imported into SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine)

  • Proprietary thing that uses columnar storage and in memory processing and machine code generation to make quick sight extremely fast

  • Uses columnar storage, in-memory, machine code generation

  • Accelerates interactive queries on large datasets

• Each user gets 10GB of SPICE

• Highly available / durable

• Scales to hundreds of thousands of users

QuickSight Use Cases

• Interactive ad-hoc exploration / visualization of data

• Dashboards and KPI dashboards

• Stories

  • Guided tours through specific views of an analysis

  • Convey key points, thought process, or the evolution of an analysis in a narrative form

• Analyze / visualize data from a variety of sources:

  • Logs in S3

  • On-premise databases

  • AWS (RDS, Redshift, Athena, S3)

  • SaaS applications, such as Salesforce

  • Any JDBC/ODBC data source endpoint

Machine Learning Insights

3 major features:

1. ML powered Anomaly detection

   • Amazon quick sight is using the random cut forest algorithm, that Amazon developed, to analyze millions/billions of data points

   • Rapidly detects the outliers

2. Forecasting

   • enables non-technical users to confidently forecast their key business metrics

   • random cut forest algorithm

   • Detects seasonality and trends

3. Auto-narratives

   • Builds a dashboards automatically in plain language

   • just a way of translating the trends and seasonality in your data into words that you can actually put into a report

What not to use QuickSight For

• Highly formatted canned reports

  • QuickSight is for ad-hoc queries, analysis, and visualization

• ETL

  • Use Glue instead, although QuickSight can do some limited transformations

QuickSight Security

• Multi-factor authentication on your account

• VPC connectivity

  • Add QuickSight's IP address range to your database security groups

• Row-level security

• Private VPC access

  • Use Elastic Network Interface or AWS Direct Connect to enable those capabilites

QuickSight User Management

• Users defined via IAM, or an email signup

• Can integrate with Active Directory with QuickSight Enterprise Edition

  • Active Directory (AD) is Microsoft's proprietary directory service. It runs on Windows Server and enables administrators to manage permissions and access to network resources.

  • Allows IT departments to manage and store information about the devices, users, and objects within your organizations network.

QuickSight Pricing

• Annual subscription

  • Standard: $9 / user /month

  • Enterprise: $18 / user / month

• Can pay Month to month

  • Standard: $12 / GB / month

  • Enterprise: $24 / GB / month

• Can purchase extra SPICE capacity (beyond 10GB)

  • $0.25 (standard) $0.38 (enterprise) / GB / month

• Enterprise edition

  • Encryption at rest

  • Microsoft Active Directory integration

QuickSight Dashboards

Dashboards are a read only snapshot of an analysis that you've created. Once you've created a dashboard, you can share that dashboard with other users who have access to QuickSight, but they cannot edit or change those filters. It's just a collection of various charts and graphs of relevant performance indicators that they care about.

QuickSight Visual Types

• AutoGraph

  • Just automatically selects the most appropriate visualization based on the properties of the data itself, instead of making you select one yourself

  • these visualization types are chosen to best reveal the data in relationships in an effective way for you

• Bar Charts

  • For comparison and distribution (histograms)

• Line graphs

  • For changes over time

  • Looking for trends or seasonality

• Scatter plots, heat maps

  • For correlation

• Pie graphs

  • For aggregation

• Tree maps

  • Heirarchical Aggregation

• Pie charts within pie charts. Each section is further broken down into sub-classifications.

• Pivot tables

  • For tabular data

  • Organizing and aggregating in different ways

• Stories

  • narratives that present iterations of your data