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Amazon QuickSight
Cloud service · AWS · Updated

Amazon QuickSight

In short

Amazon Quick Sight delivers AI-powered business intelligence capabilities within Amazon Quick, turning enterprise data into insights and connecting dashboard exploration with research and automation.

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9 key features of Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-based business intelligence service that provides interactive visualizations, rich dashboards, and ML-powered insights designed to be easily shared across organizations, all within a scalable, secure, and serverless environment.

01
Serverless Architecture

Amazon Quick Sight operates on a serverless architecture, eliminating the need for manual provisioning or management of infrastructure, ensuring scalability and cost efficiency for your business analytics needs.

02
SPICE

SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) is Quick Sight's in-memory calculation engine, designed to perform advanced calculations and serve data quickly, enabling you to perform fast, interactive analysis on large datasets.

03
Machine Learning Insights

Quick Sight integrates Machine Learning insights allowing users to uncover hidden trends and outliers, perform forecast predictions, and auto-narratives without the need for ML expertise, directly within their analyses.

04
Dashboard Embedding

With Amazon Quick Sight, you can embed interactive dashboards in applications or websites, providing rich analytics and insights seamlessly to your customers or internal users without the need for any server or software management.

05
Multi-Source Data Integration

It supports seamless integration with various data sources, including cloud and on-premises databases, third-party applications, and Excel files, allowing users to analyze and visualize data from multiple sources in a unified manner.

06
Access Control and Security

Amazon Quick Sight provides robust access control and security features, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) integration, encryption at rest and in transit, and compliance with various standards and regulations, ensuring your data's security and confidentiality.

07
Rich Visualization Library

Quick Sight includes a rich library of visualizations, interactive dashboards, and stories, offering a wide range of chart types and visualization options to help effectively convey the insights from your data.

08
Row- and Column-Level Security

Enterprise Edition supports row- and column-level security to control access within datasets.

09
API Activity Auditing

AWS CloudTrail can monitor Quick Sight API calls made through the AWS Management Console, command-line tools, and other services.

Where Amazon QuickSight is used

Amazon QuickSight is primarily used for creating interactive dashboards and visualizations, performing ad-hoc analysis, and securely sharing insights across an organization to facilitate data-driven decision-making.

  1. 01
    Business Dashboards and Reporting

    Amazon Quick Sight provides businesses with an efficient way to create interactive dashboards and reports. This allows stakeholders to easily access, understand, and analyze business metrics, leading to more informed decision-making.

  2. 02
    Real-time Analytics

    With its ability to process and analyze data in real time, Amazon Quick Sight is ideal for organizations that need up-to-the-minute insights into their operations, customer behaviors, or market trends, enabling them to react quickly to changes.

  3. 03
    Data Exploration for Non-technical Users

    Amazon Quick Sight enables users without a technical background to explore data through its intuitive interface. This democratizes data analysis, making it possible for anyone in the organization to gain insights and contribute to data-driven decisions.

  4. 04
    Embedded Analytics

    Amazon Quick Sight can be embedded into applications, websites, or portals, providing seamless analytics capabilities within existing platforms. This enhances user experience by offering personalized data insights directly where users need them.

  5. 05
    Collaborative Data Analysis

    Facilitates a collaborative environment for teams to work on data analysis projects. Users can share dashboards and insights, and collaborate in real-time, ensuring alignment and accelerating the data analysis process.

  6. 06
    ML Insights

    Amazon Quick Sight integrates with machine learning models to provide advanced analytics options, such as anomaly detection, forecasting, and narrative insights. This allows organizations to leverage AI for deeper analysis and predictive analytics.

How Amazon QuickSight is priced

Amazon QuickSight offers pricing models based on either a monthly subscription per user for Standard or Enterprise editions or a pay-per-session pricing model for dashboard viewers.

Standard Edition

Standard Edition costs $12 per user/month on the monthly plan or $9 per user/month on the annual plan. Each user includes 10 GB of SPICE capacity; additional capacity costs $0.25 per GB.

Author Per-User Pricing

Author costs $24 per user/month, and Author Pro costs $40 per user/month.

Reader Session Capacity

The monthly plan includes 500 Reader sessions for $250 per month, with additional sessions charged at $0.50 each. Annual plans are also available. A session lasts 30 minutes, and capacity pricing is required for programmatic dashboard refresh for near real-time rendering.

Amazon Q Question Capacity

Amazon Q questions can be purchased in bulk: the monthly plan includes 500 questions for $250 per month, with additional questions at $0.50 each. Annual plans include 60,000 questions for $18,000 per year or 600,000 questions for $120,000 per year, with respective overage rates of $0.30 and $0.20 per question.

Pixel-Perfect Reports

The monthly reporting plan costs $500 for 500 report units per month, with additional units at $1.00 each. The annual plan costs $24,000 per year and includes 4,000 report units per month, with additional units at $0.50 each. A report unit is up to 100 pages or 100 MB.

SPICE Capacity

Enterprise SPICE capacity costs $0.38 per GB/month. Each provisioned Author includes 10 GB, and each provisioned Author Pro includes a credit for 10 GB. Capacity can be added or removed during the month.

Alerts and Anomaly Detection

Alerts are billed per 1,000 metrics evaluated: $0.50 for the first 1 million, $0.25 for the next tier through 10 million, $0.10 through 100 million, and $0.05 above 100 million. A metric is a value or value trend evaluated at a given point in time.

AI Infrastructure Fee

A $250 per account monthly infrastructure fee applies when the account has at least one Pro user, Q&A enabled via topics, or dashboard Q&A enabled.

Reader Per-User Pricing

Reader costs $3 per user/month, and Reader Pro costs $20 per user/month.

Services Amazon QuickSight works with

Amazon RDSAmazon RDS

Amazon Quick Sight can connect to relational databases managed by Amazon RDS to visualize and analyze data stored in them.

Open Amazon RDS →
Amazon RedshiftAmazon Redshift

Quick Sight integrates with Amazon Redshift to provide quick and scalable data visualization and analysis for data warehoused in Redshift.

Open Amazon Redshift →
Amazon S3Amazon S3

Amazon Quick Sight can access data files stored in Amazon S3 buckets, enabling data visualization and analysis directly from object storage.

Open Amazon S3 →
Amazon AthenaAmazon Athena

Quick Sight integrates with Amazon Athena to allow users to query S3 data using SQL and visualize the results.

Open Amazon Athena →
Amazon DynamoDBAmazon DynamoDB

Amazon Quick Sight can connect to Amazon DynamoDB through Amazon Athena using the Athena DynamoDB connector, enabling the analysis and visualization of NoSQL data.

Open Amazon DynamoDB →
AWS GlueAWS Glue

Quick Sight integrates with AWS Glue to use Glue Data Catalog as a unified metadata repository for different data sources.

Open AWS Glue →
Amazon AuroraAmazon Aurora

Quick Sight integrates with Amazon Aurora to enable visualization and analysis of data stored in Aurora's MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

Open Amazon Aurora →
Amazon Aurora ServerlessAmazon Aurora Serverless

QuickSight connects to supported Aurora Serverless databases using its Aurora database connectors and a VPC connection when the database is private. Data can be queried directly or imported into SPICE for dashboard analysis.

Open Amazon Aurora Serverless →
Amazon Bedrock

QuickSight's generative BI capabilities use Amazon Bedrock to help users build and explore analytics through natural language. These capabilities include assistance with dashboard authoring and generating summaries of dashboard findings.

Open Amazon Bedrock →
Amazon CloudWatchAmazon CloudWatch

QuickSight publishes operational and usage metrics to CloudWatch, including SPICE ingestion metrics and dashboard performance metrics. You can create alarms to identify failed data refreshes or slow-loading dashboards.

Open Amazon CloudWatch →

What is Amazon QuickSight

3 min read

Amazon Quick Sight is an advanced, cloud-based business analytics service designed to make the power of data analysis accessible to everyone within an organization. Created by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Quick Sight enables users to easily create and publish interactive dashboards, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from their data. Its scalability and serverless nature make it a flexible tool for businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises, across various industries. 

At the core of Amazon Quick Sight is its user-friendly interface and rich set of features that cater to both novices and experienced data analysts alike. Without the need for any programming or data engineering skills, users can connect to a wide array of data sources, including cloud-based services like AWS data stores, SaaS applications, and on-premises databases, allowing them to bring together and analyze data from different silos within their organization. 

Pixel-perfect reporting supports creating, scheduling, and sharing highly formatted, multipage reports, as well as scheduling data exports at scale.

For analyses created and managed through the Quick Sight APIs, the limits include 20 sheets per analysis and 50 visuals per sheet.

Standard Edition is available through the CreateAccountSubscription API for individuals and small groups that do not need Enterprise Edition's broad sharing, distribution, and AI capabilities.

Quick Sight is available only for AWS Quick accounts provisioned through the AWS Management Console; it is not available for Free or Plus accounts created at aws.com/quick.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Amazon Quick Sight is its SPICE technology (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine), which enables lightning-fast data processing and calculation. SPICE provides a high-performance, in-memory calculation engine that significantly speeds up the data analysis process, enabling complex queries to be performed in seconds. This is particularly beneficial for large datasets, where traditional analytics tools may struggle with performance issues. 

Amazon Quick Sight also stands out for its machine learning capabilities, providing users with insights that would be difficult or time-consuming to uncover manually. For instance, it can automatically forecast business outcomes based on historical data trends, detect anomalies, and provide narrative summaries of the data, making it easier for users to understand their data at a glance. 

Author Pro users can create and manage Amazon Q Topics for questions and answers on specific data. Additional Amazon Q capabilities are available only through fixed-price Pro user roles.

Security is another cornerstone of Amazon Quick Sight, incorporating AWS's robust security measures to ensure that data is protected at all times. It provides fine-grained access controls, allowing administrators to manage who can view or interact with the data and dashboards, ensuring that sensitive information remains secure. 

Reader access is available through predictable per-user pricing or capacity-based pricing. Capacity-based pricing is intended for embedded applications or situations where the number of users or frequency of access is difficult to predict.

In conclusion, Amazon Quick Sight is a comprehensive, cloud-based analytics service that democratizes data analysis, offering sophisticated tools and features in an accessible, secure, and cost-effective manner. Whether it's through rapid insights from SPICE, leveraging machine learning for advanced analytics, or creating interactive dashboards for a wider audience, Quick Sight transforms how businesses use their data to make informed decisions.

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