Amazon QuickSight FAQs

A QuickSight Author is a user who can connect to data sources (within AWS or outside), create visuals and analyze data. Authors can create interactive dashboards using advanced QuickSight capabilities such as parameters and calculated fields, and publish dashboards with other users in the account. There are two types of Author licenses in QuickSight – Author and Author Pro. Author Pro Includes all Author capabilities and adds Amazon Q Generative BI including capabilities to build dashboards with natural language, create Q Topics, executive dashboard summaries and to build and share generative data stories. For billing purposes individuals who administer a QuickSight account will need to be an Author or Author Pro.

A QuickSight Reader is a user who consumes interactive dashboards. Readers can log in via their organization’s preferred authentication mechanism (QuickSight username/password, SAML portal or AD auth), view shared dashboards, filter data, drill down to details or export data as a CSV file, using a web browser or mobile app. Readers do not have any allocated SPICE capacity.

Individual end-users can be provisioned to access QuickSight as Readers. Reader pricing applies to manual session interactions only. We reserve the right charge for the reader at the higher monthly author rate if, in our discretion, we determine that you are using reader sessions for other types of use (for example, programmatic or automated queries).

There are two types of Reader accounts – Reader and Reader Pro. Reader Pro Includes all Reader capabilities plus Generative BI capabilities in Amazon Q including executive dashboard summaries and capability to build and share generative data stories.

No, Readers and Reader Pro are only available in Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition. If you have a Standard Edition account, you can upgrade to Enterprise Edition using the QuickSight management page.

A QuickSight Admin is a user who can manage QuickSight users and account-level preferences, as well as purchase SPICE capacity and annual subscriptions for the account. Admins also have all QuickSight authoring capabilities. Admins can also upgrade Standard Edition accounts to Enterprise Edition if needed. For billing purposes, QuickSight Authors and Admins are both recognized as Authors.

No, QuickSight Authors and Readers are user types that cannot change account permissions or invite more users. QuickSight offers an Admin user, who can manage QuickSight users and account-level preferences, as well as purchase SPICE capacity and annual subscriptions for the account. Admins also have all QuickSight authoring capabilities. Admins can also upgrade Standard Edition accounts to Enterprise Edition if needed.

QuickSight mobile apps (available on iOS and Android) gives instant access to your data and insights for you to make decisions on the go. Browse, search and interact with your dashboards. Add dashboards to Favorites for quick and easy access. Explore your data with drill downs, filtering and more. You can also use a web browser on any mobile device to access QuickSight.

QuickSight supports the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer version 10 and above, and Edge.

You can connect to AWS data sources including Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena and Amazon S3. You can also upload Excel spreadsheets or flat files (CSV, TSV, CLF, and ELF), connect to on-premises databases like SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL and import data from SaaS applications like Salesforce. We continuously add new data sources to QuickSight. You can find the latest list of supported data sources here.

Yes. To connect QuickSight to an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or on-premises database, you need to add the Amazon QuickSight IP range to the authorized list in your hosted database.

You can upload XLSX, CSV, TSV, CLF, XLF data files directly from the QuickSight website. You can also upload them to an Amazon S3 bucket and point QuickSight to the S3 object.

QuickSight seamlessly discovers your AWS data sources that are available in your account with your approval. You can immediately start browsing the data and building visualizations. You can also explicitly connect to other AWS data sources that are not in your account or in a different region by providing connection details for those sources.

QuickSight lets you prepare data that is not ready for visualization. Select the “Edit/Preview Data” button in the connection dialog. QuickSight supports various functions to format and transform your data. You can alias data fields and change data types. You can subset your data using built in filters and perform database join operations using drag and drop. You can also create calculated fields using mathematical operations and built-in functions such conditional statements, string, numerical and date functions.

With QuickSight, you don’t need to worry about scale. You can seamlessly grow your data from a few hundred megabytes to many terabytes of data without managing any infrastructure.

The first step is to connect the data source from which you want to pull data. Once you’re connected to a data source, select the “Augment with SageMaker” option. From there, you pick the model you want to use from a list of SageMaker models in your AWS account and provide the schema file, which is a JSON-formatted file that contains the input, output, and runtime settings. Review the input schema mapping with the columns in your data set. Once you’re done, you can execute this job and start running the inference.

QuickSight does inference on the full data every time it refreshes.

When you create a new QuickSight account, you have administrative privileges by default. If you are invited to become an QuickSight user, whoever invites you assigns you either an ADMIN or a USER role. If you have an ADMIN role, you can create and delete user accounts, purchase annual subscriptions and SPICE capacity in addition to using the service. To create a user account, you send an email invitation to the user via an in-application interface, and then the user completes the account creation by specifying a password and signing in.

Creating an analysis is simple. QuickSight seamlessly discovers data in popular AWS data repositories within your AWS account. Simply point QuickSight to one of the discovered data sources. To connect to another AWS data source that is not in your AWS account or in a different Region, you can provide the connection details of the source. Then, select a table and start analyzing your data. You can also upload spreadsheets and CSV files and use QuickSight to analyze your files. To create a visualization, start by selecting the data fields you want to analyze, or drag the fields directly on to the visual canvas, or a combination of both actions. QuickSight will automatically select the appropriate visualization to display based on the data you’ve selected.

QuickSight has an innovative technology called AutoGraph that allows it to select the most appropriate visualizations based on the properties of the data, such as cardinality and data type. The visualization types are chosen to best reveal the data and relationships in an effective way.

Dashboards are a collection of visualizations, tables, and other visual displays arranged and visible together. With QuickSight, you can compose a dashboard within an analysis by arranging the layouts and size of visualizations and then publish the dashboard to an audience within your organization. Or even better if you have Generative BI enabled, you can use Amazon Q and reduce the time it takes to build a dashboard from hours to minutes.

QuickSight supports assorted visualizations that facilitate different analytical approaches: Comparison and distribution Bar charts (several assorted variants) Changes over time Line graphs Area line charts Correlation Scatter plots Heat maps Aggregation Pie graphs Tree maps Tabular Pivot tables

QuickSight comes with a built-in suggestion engine that provides you with suggested visualizations based on the properties of the underlying datasets. Suggestions serve as possible first or next-steps of an analysis and removes the time-consuming task of interrogating and understanding the schema of your data. As you work with more specific data, the suggestions will update to reflect the next steps appropriate to your current analysis.

Stories are guided tours through specific views of an analysis. They are used to convey key points, a thought process, or the evolution of an analysis for collaboration. You can construct them in QuickSight by capturing and annotating specific states of the analysis. When readers of the story select an image in the story, they are then taken into the analysis at that point, where they can explore on their own.

You can perform typical arithmetic and comparison functions; conditional functions such as if,then; and date, numeric, and string calculations.

Today, Billing and Cost Management offers direct integration with QuickSight, which automates creation of the Cost and Usage Dashboard that you can use to gain insights into AWS spend. This dashboard is inspired by the open source project, Cloud Intelligence Dashboards (CID). The Cost and Usage Dashboard brings the benefits of CID to the Billing and Cost Management console as an AWS supported feature and removes the need for maintaining underlying infrastructure like Amazon Athena views or AWS Glue crawlers. You can deploy the Cost and Usage Dashboard from the Data Exports page in the Billing and Cost Management console.

For your convenience, sample analyses are automatically generated when you create an account in Amazon QuickSight. The raw data can also be downloaded from the links below: Business overview People overview Sales pipeline Web and marketing analytics These datasets were created by 47Lining, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with Big Data Competency designation.

You have several options to get your data into QuickSight: file upload, connect to AWS data sources, connect to external data stores over JDBC/ODBC, or through other API-based data store connectors.

Yes. For better performance and user interactivity, customers are advised to use the region where your data is stored. The QuickSight auto discovery feature detects data sources only within the Region of the QuickSight endpoint to which you are connected. For a list of the supported QuickSight Regions, visit Regional Products and Services for all AWS global infrastructure.

If your VPC has been set up with public connectivity, you can add a QuickSight IP address range to your database instances’ security group rules to enable traffic flow into your VPC and database instances.

Row-level security (RLS) enables QuickSight dataset owners to control access to data at row granularity based on permissions associated with the user interacting with the data. With RLS, QuickSight users only need to manage a single set of data and apply appropriate row-level dataset rules to it. All associated dashboards and analyses will enforce these rules, simplifying dataset management and removing the need to maintain multiple datasets for users with different data access privileges.

If you have data in AWS (perhaps in Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, or on EC2) or on-premises in Teradata or SQL Server on servers without public connectivity, this feature is for you. Private VPC (virtual private cloud) Access for QuickSight uses an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) for secure, private communication with data sources in a VPC. It also allows you to use AWS Direct Connect to create a secure, private link with your on-premises resources.

You can share an analysis, dashboard, or story using the share icon from the QuickSight service interface. You will be able to select the recipients (email address, username or group name), permission levels, and other options before sharing the content with others.

Yes, Standard Edition account accounts can be upgraded to Enterprise Edition through the QuickSight management page. Existing authentication details and user data will be seamlessly migrated to Enterprise Edition. Enterprise Edition rates for user and SPICE capacity will apply.

No, you will not be able to downgrade from Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition to Standard Edition. Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition offers enhanced functionality such as QuickSight Readers, connectivity to data sources in Private VPC, row-level security, hourly refresh of SPICE data as well as AD connectivity and group-based management of assets for AD accounts. Due to the differences in feature set, a downgrade might result in loss of data connectivity and security, and as a result, this option is not supported.