Article

Visualizing your data with Amazon QuickSight

July 15, 2021 · Authored by Neeraj Iyer

Amazon QuickSight is an Amazon Web Service (AWS) service built for the cloud that enables customers to visualize their data. Quicksight is used for creating and publishing dashboards that include machine learning (ML) powered insights which can be accessed from any device. The first article in this series explored what Amazon Quicksight is and the business intelligence it can provide. This second article in the series will dive into the functionality, features and capabilities of Amazon Quicksight.

Identifying the types of QuickSight users

QuickSight provides multitenancy security where users are grouped into namespaces such as admin, author and reader, making QuickSight even more secure. A breakdown of the QuickSight users is as follows:

A QuickSight admin has the highest privilege and can manage QuickSight user activities
A QuickSight author is typically a business intelligence (BI) analyst, data engineer or data analyst who will create dashboards
A QuickSight reader is an end user with view-only access to QuickSight dashboards

Quicksight users

QuickSight data sources and use cases

The following data sources are supported by Amazon QuickSight:

Relational data sources: Aurora, Athena, Elasticsearch, Redshift, S3, Spark, AWS IOT Analytics, Maria DB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Presto, Snowflake and Teradata
Importing file data: XLSX, JSON, CSV, TSV, ELF and CLF
Software as a service data: JIRA, ServiceNow, Adobe Analytics, GitHub, Salesforce, Twitter and Square
Databases installed on Amazon EC2
Local on-premises databases
Data in a data center or some internet-accessible environment

Connecting QuickSight to your data in an Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

QuickSight can be used with data imported from any database to create interactive dashboards.

Connecting other databases to QuickSight

Connecting QuickSight to your data lakes

QuickSight uses an AWS glue crawler to fetch data from an S3 bucket and load it to the appropriate staging area like Amazon Athena, EMR and Amazon Redshift spectrum, before loading it into QuickSight to create interactive dashboards.

Connecting other data lakes to QuickSight

Dashboard and analysis sharing

Dashboards can be shared with users who have access to the QuickSight account. QuickSight provides secure sharing by restricting access to only users on the account or those to whom access is granted. Reports can be scheduled to be emailed to users on a monthly, weekly or daily basis, and can also be optimized for a desktop view or a mobile device. Below is a snapshot of a QuickSight dashboard email, the email title and body can be customized.

QuickSight dashboard email

QuickSight themes

QuickSight themes is a powerful feature, enabling users to customize the look of visualizations to match brand guidelines or other preferences. Themes can be customized, edited, saved and shared with others. Data colors can be selected and saved for future analyses or dashboards. The background and foreground color and text fonts can also be preset and customized. Analysis visualizations can have only one theme applied at a time. QuickSight provides its own starter themes, but users can also create their own.

QuickSight theming capability

SPICE: In memory engine

SPICE is QuickSight’s Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine. SPICE performs advanced calculations and the enterprise edition includes data encryption for all data stored in SPICE.

When data is imported from different data sources it can be imported into SPICE mode, instead of direct SQL query mode. This is particularly beneficial if the data includes complex calculations in the analysis as it will save time and overall costs. Every AWS region has an allocated SPICE capacity that is shared between all the people using QuickSight in a single AWS region. The QuickSight administrator can review SPICE capacity usage, purchase more SPICE capacity and also release unused capacity.

Build predictive dashboards with Amazon SageMaker

QuickSight integrates well with already-built models in Amazon SageMaker which can make it a faster, easier and cost-effective solution. Customers can import data from any data source and select the appropriate SageMaker model for prediction without having to write any code.

Machine learning (ML) Insights

Baker Tilly can help

Baker Tilly can help organizations fully leverage Amazon QuickSight based on their technology portfolio, product strategy, governance and operational design. Connect with our team to learn more about Amazon QuickSight and how your business can begin incorporating it into your operations.