What is Amazon QuickSight?
Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-based business intelligence (BI)
service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables
organizations to visualize their data and gain insights from it through interactive dashboards and reports.
Why it’s useful:
Connect to Data Sources:QuickSight connects to avariety of data sources, including AWS services(Amazon S3, Redshift,RDS),on premises databases,and third-party sources like Salesforce, MySQL,PostgreSQL, and more.
Upload your dataset and a manifest.json file into S3
S3 is used in this project to host the files that will be analysed byAmazonQuicksight.
I edited the manifest.json file by changing the URL in the manifest file.
Create yourAmazonQuicksight account
Go on search bar and type Quicksort and click on that.
It doesn’t cost to create a quicksight account.
It took about 10 minutes to create the account considering the few errors I ran into.
I also had to enable QuickSight’s access to S3 because my dataset was saved in an S3 instance hence needed to interface it with Quicksight.
Connect S3 + QuickSight
I connected the S3 bucket to QuickSight by copying the
manifest.json URI.The manifest.json file was important in this step because it
helps Quicksight find our dataset in our bucket and understand
our data so it can represent i in charts and graphs.
Let’s make visualisations!
To create visualisation on QuickSight, you’ll have to drag a
category to the AutoGraph dashboard
-The chart/graph shown here is a breakdown of the number of
movies released each year by their categories(movies/tv show)
I created this graph by having the release year on the y-axis
and having the Type on group to show different colors for each
category.
Filters are useful for specifying the variables and exact values
you want to compare while excluding what you don’t want.Here I added a filter by excluding movies and TV shows
released before 2015.This helped me create a visualization on
the three genres released from 2015.
Set up your dashboard!
As a finishing touch, I arranged my visuals in a good looking
format
-Did you know you could export your dashboard as PDFs too? I
did this by clicking ‘Export’ and ‘Generate PDF’ then waiting for
it to prepare download.
My key learnings
An S3 bucket was used in this project to store the dataset
and manifest.json file.To connect the data stored in S3 with QuickSight, I had to
link the manifest.json file URI to Quicksight.It is easy to create visualizations in Quicksight and it is easy to navigate different toggles.
One thing I didn’t expect was the ease in creating
visualizations and how it recommends if you put a graph in
the Autograph.