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Quicksight

Operational Characteristics

  • Cost
    • Amazon QuickSight has two different editions for pricing; standard edition and enterprise edition.
    • Pricing is based on an annual subscription.
    • Both standard and enterprise editions include SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, and In-memory Calculation Engine) capacity, and you can get additional SPICE capacity for a monthly add on cost.
    • Month to month billing options are available for both the editions.
  • Performance
    • Amazon QuickSight is built with SPICE. Built from the ground up for the cloud.
    • SPICE uses a combination of columnar storage, in-memory technologies enabled through the latest hardware innovations, and machine code generation to run interactive queries on large datasets and get rapid responses.
  • Durability and availability
    • SPICE automatically replicates data for high availability and enables Amazon QuickSight to scale to hundreds of thousands of users who can all simultaneously perform fast interactive analysis across a wide variety of AWS data sources.
  • Scalability & Elasticity
    • Fully managed service that auto-scales
  • Interfaces: Amazon QuickSight can connect to a wide variety of data sources including:
    • flat files (CSV, TSV, CLF, ELF)
    • on-premises databases like SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
    • AWS data sources including Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena and Amazon S3
    • SaaS applications like Salesforce.
    • You can also export analyzes from a visual to a file with CSV format.

Quicksight is integrated with CloudTrail, so all events including non-API events such as deleting dashboards can be stored through CloudTrail into S3.

Reader Sessions

  • Amazon QuickSight Reader sessions are of 30-minute duration each. Each session is charged at $0.30 with maximum charges of $5 per Reader in a month.
  • A Reader session starts with a user-initiated action (e.g., login, dashboard load, page refresh, drill-down or filtering) and runs for next 30-minutes.
  • Keeping Amazon QuickSight open in a background browser window/tab does not result in active sessions until the Reader initiates action on page.
  • Readers will only be logged out of QuickSight when their authentication expires, which is dependent on the authentication scheme in place (can be one of QuickSight-only users, SAML/Open ID Connect or Active Directory).
  • A reader will be charged $0.30 a session up to a maximum of $5/month, after which the reader can access QuickSight at no charge for additional sessions.

Supported Visualizations

Amazon QuickSight supports assorted visualizations that facilitate different analytical approaches:

Category Charts
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
show differences in data values across a geographical map Geo-spatial charts (maps)
KPIs Comparison between a key-value and it's target value

Kibana

Kibana is built into Amazon ES.

Active Directory Integration

Amazon QuickSight Enterprise edition supports both AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory and Active Directory Connector. Standard Edition does not support AD Connector.

Authentication

  • Amazon QuickSight Enterprise edition supports both AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory and Active Directory Connector.

Encryption

In Amazon QuickSight Enterprise edition, the data at rest in SPICE is encrypted using block-level encryption with AWS-managed keys. You cannot use customer-provided keys that are imported into AWS KMS.

S3 Integration

  • Datasets created using Amazon S3 as the data source are automatically imported into SPICE.
  • The Amazon QuickSight console allows for the refresh of SPICE data on a schedule.

You need to authorize Amazon QuickSight to access your S3 bucket from within the Amazon QuickSight Console.