Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight is a BI tool for constructing data dashboards. Launched in 2016, this tool allows users to create analyses and visualizations that can help organizations make better decisions.

QuickSight can analyze data from files such as Excel, applications such as Salesforce, databases such as Snowflake, and other AWS services such as Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon S3.

For more insights, QuickSight integrates ML tools to automatically detect data anomalies, forecast metrics, and generate natural-language narratives. An add-on feature QuickSight Q allows users to ask questions (and get potentially helpful responses) in natural language (e.g., English).

Creating a QuickSight dashboard

Let’s learn more about QuickSight by creating an example dashboard.

Sign up for QuickSight

First-time users of QuickSight will need to sign up for the service in their AWS account. Navigate to the QuickSight area in the AWS console and click the “Sign up for QuickSight” button.

The sign-up flow offers three editions of QuickSight: Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise + Q. The Standard edition is sufficient for our example dashboard. (The link to sign up for the Standard edition is a very small link at the bottom of the “Create your QuickSight account” page.)

After the sign-up process, a new installation of QuickSight is ready with a few samples in the “Analyses” and “Datasets” pages.

Connecting to the data

Let’s look at our options for adding new data to QuickSight.

We go to the “Datasets” page and click the “New dataset” button at the top right corner. On the subsequent page, we see the full list of options for creating a new dataset.

The “FROM NEW DATA SOURCES” option includes uploading a CSV file, connecting to Amazon RDS, and connecting to the Snowflake data warehouse.

The “FROM EXISTING DATA SOURCES” option includes datasets we already have available in QuickSight.

On the top right corner of some pages, there’s an indicator “SPICE capacity for this region.” This indicator refers to an in-memory engine (SPICE: Super-fast, Parallel, in-memory Calculation Engine) that QuickSight uses to serve data, answer questions, and make calculations faster. Administrators can purchase additional SPICE capacity ...