QuickSight

🧠 What is Amazon QuickSight?

Amazon QuickSight is a serverless Business Intelligence (BI) service that allows you to visualize your data and derive actionable insights from it via interactive dashboards, ad-hoc analysis, and ML-powered insights.

✅ Unlike traditional BI tools, it’s cloud-native, scalable, pay-per-use, and directly integrates with AWS data sources.

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📊 Core Use Cases

Use Case	Why Use QuickSight?
📈 Executive Dashboards	Visualize KPIs in real-time from data lakes or warehouses
🧪 Data Exploration	Drill-down, filter, and pivot AWS data with ease
🔄 Cost Monitoring	Visualize AWS Cost & Usage Reports via Athena/S3
🔍 Log Analytics	Build dashboards on CloudTrail, VPC logs, etc.
🛠️ Embedded Analytics	Embed dashboards in your own apps using QuickSight API

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🧱 How It Works

       [S3]    [RDS]   [Redshift]   [Athena]   [Salesforce] ...
         ↓        ↓        ↓           ↓            ↓
      ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────┐
      │          Amazon QuickSight SPICE Engine       │
      │    (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation) │
      └───────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                              ↓
               Dashboards, Reports, ML Insights

Data Sources

• Amazon S3

• Amazon Redshift

• Amazon Athena

• RDS / Aurora

• Snowflake, Salesforce, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and more

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🚀 Key Features

Feature	Description
SPICE Engine	In-memory caching engine for fast and interactive analytics
ML Insights	Forecasting, anomaly detection, and narrative summaries using ML
Interactive Dashboards	Real-time filtering, drill-down, pivoting
Scheduled Reports	Send reports via email on schedule
Embedded Analytics	Embed dashboards into web apps with Row-level security
Row-level Security (RLS)	Show filtered data per user group
Natural Language Querying	Ask Q (ex: “sales last quarter”)

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🛡️ Security & Governance

Security Feature	Description
IAM Integration	Fine-grained access to data sources
RLS (Row-Level Security)	Enforce user-specific data visibility
Private VPC Access	Access RDS or Redshift in private subnets
Encryption at Rest	KMS integration for dashboards and SPICE
Audit Logging	CloudTrail logs for dashboard activity and API usage

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💸 Pricing (2024)

Two Modes:

Mode	Pricing
Standard	$9/user/month (provisioned users only)
Enterprise	$18/user/month + $0.30/session for readers
SPICE Storage	$0.25 per GB/month (first 10 GB/user is free)

🧠 Tip: Use Reader Mode with pay-per-session for large orgs with many consumers.

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🧰 Terraform Integration (via aws_quicksight_* resources)

Here's a Terraform snippet to set up QuickSight access and a data source using Athena.

1. Enable QuickSight and Identity Federation

resource "aws_quicksight_user" "admin" {
  user_name     = "quicksight-admin"
  email         = "admin@example.com"
  identity_type = "IAM"
  user_role     = "ADMIN"
  aws_account_id = data.aws_caller_identity.current.account_id
}

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2. Create a Data Source (Athena Example)

resource "aws_quicksight_data_source" "athena" {
  data_source_id = "athena-ds"
  name           = "athena-ds"
  type           = "ATHENA"

  aws_account_id = data.aws_caller_identity.current.account_id

  parameters {
    athena {
      work_group = "primary"
    }
  }

  permissions {
    principal = "arn:aws:quicksight:us-east-1:${data.aws_caller_identity.current.account_id}:user/default/quicksight-admin"

    actions = [
      "quicksight:DescribeDataSource",
      "quicksight:DescribeDataSourcePermissions",
      "quicksight:PassDataSource",
      "quicksight:UpdateDataSource",
      "quicksight:DeleteDataSource"
    ]
  }
}

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🔄 Integrations

Source	Supported?
S3 via Athena/Glue	✅
RDS (MySQL, PostgreSQL)	✅
Amazon Redshift	✅
Salesforce	✅
Snowflake, Teradata	✅
JDBC/ODBC	✅

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🧪 Best Practices

Tip	Why It's Important
Use SPICE	Reduces latency and cost (offloads from data source)
Define RLS	Enforce data isolation by user/team
Enable CloudTrail	Track access and changes to dashboards
Use Embedding API	Add dashboards inside your app with access control
Use Athena for S3 log analytics	Fast ad-hoc queries from S3 stored logs

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✅ TL;DR Summary

Feature	Amazon QuickSight
Serverless BI	✅ Yes
Cost Model	Per user/month + optional per session
SPICE Engine	Fast in-memory analytics engine
Security	IAM, VPC, RLS, KMS
Embeddable	✅ Yes (for apps and portals)
Integration	Athena, S3, RDS, Redshift, external DBs
Terraform Support	✅ (Partial but growing)

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🎯 When to Use QuickSight?

• Need real-time dashboards over Athena or Redshift

• Want a cloud-native alternative to Tableau/Power BI

• Need embedded dashboards in a SaaS product

• Have large teams needing pay-per-session access

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