AWS Quicksight

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 AWS Quicksight

About the Tutorial

AWS Quicksight is an AWS based Business Intelligence and visualization tool that is used
to visualize data and create stories to provide graphical details of the data. Data is entered
as dataset and you can apply filters, hierarchies, and columns to prepare documents. You
can choose various charts like Bar charts, Pie charts, etc. to visualize the data effectively.
This basic tutorial will help you to understand and learn AWS Quicksight tool.

Audience
AWS Quicksight is meant for BI developers and business users who can alter data
structures and correlations in whatever way they want. They can create data visualizations
and stories from multiple data sources. It helps to adapt data to organizational needs to
create stories with visualizations.

Prerequisites
Before you start proceeding with this tutorial, we are assuming that you are already aware
of the basics of Business Intelligence and SQL. If you are not exposed to BI concepts, then
we will suggest you first to go through our short tutorial on same topics.

Copyright & Disclaimer

 Copyright 2019 by Tutorials Point (I) Pvt. Ltd.

All the content and graphics published in this e-book are the property of Tutorials Point (I)
Pvt. Ltd. The user of this e-book is prohibited to reuse, retain, copy, distribute or republish
any contents or a part of contents of this e-book in any manner without written consent
of the publisher.

We strive to update the contents of our website and tutorials as timely and as precisely as
possible, however, the contents may contain inaccuracies or errors. Tutorials Point (I) Pvt.
Ltd. provides no guarantee regarding the accuracy, timeliness or completeness of our
website or its contents including this tutorial. If you discover any errors on our website or
in this tutorial, please notify us at [email protected]

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 AWS Quicksight

Table of Contents
About the Tutorial ........................................................................................................................................... ii

Audience .......................................................................................................................................................... ii

Prerequisites .................................................................................................................................................... ii

Copyright & Disclaimer .................................................................................................................................... ii

Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................................... iii

1. AWS Quicksight — Overview .................................................................................................................... 1

2. AWS Quicksight ― Landing Page ............................................................................................................... 2

All analysis ....................................................................................................................................................... 4

All dashboards ................................................................................................................................................. 4

Tutorial videos ................................................................................................................................................. 5

3. AWS Quicksight — Using Data Sources ..................................................................................................... 7

Uploading a file from system ........................................................................................................................... 8

Using a file from S3 format .............................................................................................................................. 8

MySQL ............................................................................................................................................................. 9

Athena ........................................................................................................................................................... 10

Deleting a data source ................................................................................................................................... 11

4. AWS Quicksight ― Data Source Limit ...................................................................................................... 13

File ................................................................................................................................................................. 13

Table and Query ............................................................................................................................................ 13

5. AWS Quicksight — Editing Datasets ........................................................................................................ 16

6. AWS Quicksight ― Creating New Analysis .............................................................................................. 18

7. AWS Quicksight — Adding Visuals .......................................................................................................... 21

8. AWS Quicksight ― Using Filters to a Visual ............................................................................................. 23

9. AWS Quicksight — Insights ..................................................................................................................... 24

10. AWS Quicksight ― Creating Story ........................................................................................................... 26

11. AWS Quicksight — Using Parameters...................................................................................................... 27

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 AWS Quicksight

Creating a Parameter .................................................................................................................................... 27

12. AWS Quicksight ― Sharing Analysis ........................................................................................................ 29

13. AWS Quicksight — Dashboards ............................................................................................................... 30

14. AWS Quicksight ― Managing Quicksight ................................................................................................ 32

15. AWS Quicksight — Edition Type .............................................................................................................. 36

16. AWS Quicksight ― Managing IAM Policies.............................................................................................. 39

IAM policy for dashboard embedding ........................................................................................................... 40

17. AWS Quicksight — Embedding Dashboard .............................................................................................. 42

18. AWS Quicksight ― AWS SDKs ................................................................................................................. 48

19. AWS Quicksight — Developer Responsibilities ........................................................................................ 50

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 1. AWS Quicksight — Overview AWS Quicksight

AWS Quicksight is one of the most powerful Business Intelligence tools which allows you
to create interactive dashboards within minutes to provide business insights into the
organizations. There are number of visualizations or graphical formats available in which
the dashboards can be created. The dashboards get automatically updated as the data is
updated or scheduled. You can also embed the dashboard created in Quicksight to your
web application.

With the latest ML insights, also known as Machine Learning insights, Quicksight uses its
inbuilt algorithms to find any kind of anomalies or peaks in the historical data. This helps
to get prepared with the business requirements ahead of time based on these insights.
Here is quick guide to get started with Quicksight.

Below is official product description page from AWS:

https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/

You can also subscribe for an AWS trial account by filling the below mentioned information
and click on Continue button.

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 2. AWS Quicksight ― Landing Page AWS Quicksight

To access AWS Quicksight tool, you can open it directly by passing this URL in web browser
or navigating to AWS Console -> Services.

https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/

Once you open this URL, on top right corner click on “Sign in to the Console”.

You need to provide the below details to login to Quicksight tool:

 Account ID or alias
 IAM User name
 Password

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 AWS Quicksight

Once you login into Quicksight, you will see the below screen:

As marked in the above image,

Section A: “New Analysis” icon is used to create a new analysis. When you click on this,
it will ask you to select any data set. You can also create a new data set as shown below:

Section B: The “Manage data” icon will show all the data sets that have already been
input to Quicksight. This option can be used to manage the dataset without creating any
analysis.

Section C: It shows various data sources you have already connected to. You can also
connect to a new data source or upload a file.
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 AWS Quicksight

Section D: This section contains icon for already created analysis, published dashboards
and tutorial videos explaining about Quicksight in detail.

You can click on each tab to view them as below:

All analysis
Here, you can see all the existing analysis in AWS Quicksight account including report and
dashboards.

All dashboards
This option shows only existing dashboards in AWS Quicksight account.

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 AWS Quicksight

Tutorial videos

Other option to open Quicksight console is by navigating to AWS console using below URL:

https://aws.amazon.com/console/

Once you login, you need to navigate to Services tab and search for Quicksight in search
bar. If you have recently used Quicksight services in AWS account, it will be seen under
History tab.

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AWS Quicksight

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3. AWS Quicksight — Using Data Sources AWS Quicksight

AWS Quicksight accepts data from various sources. Once you click on “New Dataset” on
the home page, it gives you options of all the data sources that can be used.

Below are the sources containing the list of all internal and external sources:

Let us go through connecting Quicksight with some of the most commonly used data
sources:

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 AWS Quicksight

Uploading a file from system

It allows you to input .csv, .tsv, .clf,.elf.xlsx and Json format files only. Once you select
the file, Quicksight automatically recognizes the file and displays the data. When you click
on Upload a File button, you need to provide the location of file which you want to use
to create dataset.

Using a file from S3 format

The screen will appear as below. Under Data source name, you can enter the name to be
displayed for the data set that would be created. Also you would require either uploading
a manifest file from your local system or providing the S3 location of the manifest file.

Manifest file is a json format file, which specifies the url/location of input files and their
format. You can enter more than one input files, provided the format is same. Here is an
example of a manifest file. The “URI” parameter used to pass the location of input file is
S3.

{
"fileLocations": [
{
"URIs": [
"url of first file",
"url of second file",
"url of 3rd file and so on"
]
},

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 AWS Quicksight

}
],
"globalUploadSettings": {

"format": "CSV",
"delimiter": ",",
"textqualifier": "'",
"containsHeader": "true"
}
}

The parameters passed in globalUploadSettings are the default ones. You can change
these parameters as per your requirements.

MySQL
You need to enter the database information in the fields to connect to your database. Once
it is connected to your database, you can import the data from it.

Following information is required when you connect to any RDBMS database:

 DSN name
 Type of connection
 Database server name
 Port
 Database name
 User name
 Password

Following RDBMS based data sources are supported in Quicksight:

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 Amazon Athena
 Amazon Aurora
 Amazon Redshift
 Amazon Redshift Spectrum
 Amazon S3
 Amazon S3 Analytics
 Apache Spark 2.0 or later
 MariaDB 10.0 or later
 Microsoft SQL Server 2012 or later
 MySQL 5.1 or later
 PostgreSQL 9.3.1 or later
 Presto 0.167 or later
 Snowflake
 Teradata 14.0 or later

Athena
Athena is the AWS tool to run queries on tables. You can choose any table from Athena or
run a custom query on those tables and use the output of those queries in Quicksight.
There are couple of steps to choose data source.

When you choose Athena, below screen appears. You can input any data source name
which you want to give to your data source in Quicksight. Click on “Validate Connection”.
Once the connection is validated, click on the “Create new source” button.

Now choose the table name from the dropdown. The dropdown will show the databases
present in Athena which will further show tables in that database. Else you can click on
“Use custom SQL” to run query on Athena tables.

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 AWS Quicksight

Once done, you can click on “Edit/Preview data” or “Visualize” to either edit your data
or directly visualize the data as per your requirement.

Deleting a data source

When you delete a data source which is in use in any of the Quicksight dashboards, it can
make associated data set unusable. It usually happens when you query a SQL based data
source.

When you create a dataset based on S3, Sales force or SPICE, it does not affect your
ability to use any dataset as data is stored in SPICE; however refresh option is not available
in this case.

To delete a data source, select the data source. Navigate to From Existing Data Source
tab on creating a dataset page.

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Before deletion, you can also confirm estimated table size and other details of data source.

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4. AWS Quicksight ― Data Source Limit AWS Quicksight

When you use different data sources in Quicksight tool, there are certain limits that apply
based on data sources.

File
You can use up to 25GB of total size specified in manifest file. This limit is dependent on
the file size after it is imported to SPICE.

The number of files supported in manifest file is 1000 and you also have some limit on
number of columns in each file.

Table and Query

When you are querying a large table, it is recommended that you use Where or Having
condition to reduce the number of data imported to SPICE. Query result imported into
SPICE should not exceed 25 GB.

You can deselect some of the columns while importing the data into SPICE.

In case your data source contains data type which are not supported in Quicksight, AWS
Quicksight skips those values.

Person ID Sales Date Amount

001 10/14/2017 12.43

002 5/3/2017 25.00

003 Unknown 18.17

004 3/8/2019 86.02

From the above values, Quicksight will drop the no date value row while importing this
data in dataset. Following data types are supported in Quicksight:

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 AWS Quicksight

Database String Data Date time Data Boolean Data

Number Data Types
Source Types Types Types

 bigint
 decimal
 double
Amazon  char  date
 integer  Boolean
Athena,  varchar  timestamp
 real
Presto
 smallint
 tinyint

 bigint
 decimal
 double  char
 date
Amazon  int  enum
 datetime
Aurora,  integer  set
 timestamp
MariaDB,  mediumint  text
 year
and MySQL  numeric  varchar
 smallint
 tinyint

 bigint
 decimal  char
 double  character
 integer  text  date
 Boolean
PostgreSQL  numeric  varchar  timestamp
 precision  varying
 real character
 smallint

 bigint
 decimal
 double
 date
Apache  integer  varchar  Boolean
 timestamp
Spark  real
 smallint
 tinyint

 bigint
 byteint
 decimal
 double
 doubleprecision
 float  char  date
 float4  character  datetime
 float8  string  time  Boolean
Snowflake
 int  text  timestamp
 integer  varchar  timestamp_*
 number
 numeric
 real
 smallint
 tinyint

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 AWS Quicksight

 bigint
 bit
 decimal
 char  date
 int
 nchar  datetime
 money
Microsoft  nvarchar  datetime2  bit
 numeric
SQL Server  text  datetimeoffset
 real
 varchar  smalldatetime
 smallint
 smallmoney
 tinyint

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5. AWS Quicksight — Editing Datasets AWS Quicksight

When you create a new dataset to be used in Quicksight, the following message would
appear. You can preview or edit the data as per your requirement. You can change the
types of certain fields, rename the headers or add some calculated fields based on input
fields.

Once you click Edit/Preview data, you will be able to see the header and the fields on your
input dataset. Here is a sample dataset:

There is an option of adding calculated fields as well. You can use inbuilt functions on input
fields to create a new field. There are number of options like concatenating multiple fields,

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unstring a single field into multiple fields, time difference between to dates and so on. The
complete list is shown below:

Once you are done with adding or modifying fields, just click “Save and Visualize” or just
“Save” at the top. The “Save” button will keep you on existing screen while “Save and
Visualize” will take you to the visual creation screen.

To cancel your changes, click on Cancel button at the top.

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6. AWS Quicksight ― Creating New Analysis AWS Quicksight

An analysis is a combination of one or more visuals. A visual is the representation of data

in graphical, chart or tabular format. There are number of formats available to create any
visual. This includes the pie charts, horizontal bar chart, vertical bar chart and pivot table.

Once the input data set has been modified as per business requirement, double click on
the dataset and click on visualize to start creating new analysis. It will show you the below
screen or the workspace.

Once you select a field, Quicksight automatically chooses the type of visual depending
upon the field. If you want to change the visual type, you can select one of the visual
types.

For example, we start by selecting the Horizontal bar under visual types. First, drag any
one field inside the visual in the centre. At the top, you will see “Fields wells” containing
fields used in visual and the corresponding axis. You can click on the down arrow at the
last just under user name.

This will give you an expanded view. I have selected Gender on Y axis and Job family
under Group/colour. You can modify the fields from dropdown. Under value, you can add
any numeric field and use aggregate function on that field. By default, the visual will show
count of rows.

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The visual will appear as follows:

There are options to change the heading/title of the visual and number of other formatting
options. Click the dropdown on the right most. The options will expand. Choose “format
visual”. You will be able to see various options in left tab under “Format visual”.

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X- Axis/Y-Axis: This gives the option if you want to see the label or field name on the
respective axis. It also allows you to rename these labels.

Group/Color: This provides the option to change the default colors in the visual.

Legend: This provides the options to change title and position of title in the visual. You
can also rename the title by just clicking over it.

Data labels: This provides the option to show exact values of each bar and the position
where the values needs to be displayed.

The below screen shows the visual with everything turned on:

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 7. AWS Quicksight — Adding Visuals AWS Quicksight

To add a new visual, click on the “Add” sign at the top. Another rectangular space would
be added to the analysis. You can select different visual types and fields to create another
visual.

When you click on Add button, you have the option to add following to your existing
analysis:

 Add Visual
 Add Insight
 Add Title
 Add Description
 Add Calculation Field
 Add Parameter

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To format a visual, you can also use drop down arrow button available at top right corner
of the chart. Following options are available:

 Maximize
 Format visual
 Hide legend
 Export to CSV
 Hide “other” categories
 URL actions
 Delete

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8. AWS Quicksight ― Using Filters to a Visual AWS Quicksight

Quicksight allows you to add filters to the visual being created. You have the option to
apply filter to only a single visual under any analysis or all the visuals. To add filter, click
on “Filter” icon on the left tab. It will show existing filter if there is any or filter can be
created as per the requirement. In the below example, we don’t have any existing filters,
so it gave an option to “Create one”

On clicking create one, you can create filter. This allows you to choose if you want to add
filter to just one or all the visuals. It also allows you to choose the field on which you want
to apply filter.

In the above example, we have added a filter on “Date of Birth” field on input dataset and
specified a Date. Now, the visual contains the average tenure of employees under different
job level and job family but only including employees whose Date of Birth is after 1980-
01-01.

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 9. AWS Quicksight — Insights AWS Quicksight

Amazon uses its machine learning capabilities to analyze your data and provide insights.
The insights show you the trends in the data, help in forecasting business metrics and
identify key drivers. It saves lot of your time to analyze and create them manually. With
the help of insights, you can easily understand various points which help you to determine
and make best decisions, and achieve your goals.

Once you click on the Insights, the left panel displays the automatically calculated and
created insights by Quicksight under “Suggested Insights”

If you hover on the right of each insight heading, you will see a “+” sign and 3 dotes. The
“+” sign is used to add the insight to your analysis while the 3 dotes gives you option to
add in filters to existing insights. To add an insight, click on the “Add” sign at the top and
click on “Add insights”.

You can further choose the computation type you want to perform and add that insight to
your analysis. “Forecast” and Anomaly detection are powered by machine learning and
are available in “Enterprise edition” of Quicksight.

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AWS Quicksight

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10. AWS Quicksight ― Creating Story AWS Quicksight

Story is an option wherein you capture a series of screens and play them one by one. For
example, if you want to see a visual with different filter options, you can use story. To
create a Story, click on Story on the leftmost panel. By default, there is a story with name
Storyboard 1. Now capture the screen using the capture icon at the right most panel on
the top. Each capture of the screen is also referred to as Scene. You can capture multiple
scenes and those will get added under “Storyboard 1”. The data in the story gets
automatically refreshed once your main data source is refreshed.

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11. AWS Quicksight — Using Parameters AWS Quicksight

Parameters are variables that are created to pass control of the user to modify the
dashboards. Parameters can be created using the fields of the input data set or on the
filters created for analysis. For example, you create a parameter using a filter, the
dashboard users can directly apply filter without creating any filter.

Creating a Parameter
In this section, we will see how to create a parameter:

Step 1: Enter the name of parameter. Let us take Gender as parameter.

Step 2: Choose data type. By default, it is string.

Step 3: Choose the possible options as below.

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The parameter would be added. You can choose to add control to the dashboard.

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12. AWS Quicksight ― Sharing Analysis AWS Quicksight

Once the analysis is ready, this can be shared with users by email or other Quicksight
users. On the top right side menu, there is a “Share” icon.

By default, the analysis can be accessed by the author or admin only. You would require
providing access to the user to be able to view the analysis. On clicking “Manage analysis
access”, it will show all the registered users. You can choose the users you want to extend
the access and click on “Invite users”. The users will get an email notification and once
they accept the notification, they will be able to get analysis by email.

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 13. AWS Quicksight — Dashboards AWS Quicksight

A dashboard shows the screenshot of the analysis. Unlike Analysis, dashboards are read
as only screenshots. One can just use the parameters and filters created in visuals to
create new visuals but with same charts.

To generate a dashboard of the analysis you have created, just click on publish dashboard
under share icon. Provide any name to the dashboard and click on “Publish Dashboard”
icon.

You can opt to share the dashboard with all users in this account or only particular users.

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 AWS Quicksight

Now the dashboard is visible under “All dashboards” tab on home screen.

Here is the sample dashboard with a filter attached to it. You can see that there is no
option to edit the dashboard except applying filters added while creating visuals.

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14. AWS Quicksight ― Managing Quicksight AWS Quicksight

Manage Quicksight is to manage your current account. You can add users with respective
roles, manage your subscription, and check SPICE capacity or whitelist domains for
embedding. You would require admin access to perform any activity on this page.

Under the user profile, you will find the option to manage Quicksight.

On clicking Manage subscription, below screen will appear. It will show the users in this
account and their respective roles.

You also have a search option; in case you want to particularly search for an existing user
in Quicksight.

You can invite users with valid email address or you can add users with a valid IAM account.
The users with IAM role can then login to their Quicksight account and view the dashboard
to which they have access.

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Your Subscriptions will show the edition of Quicksight you are subscribed to.

SPICE capacity shows the capacity of their calculation engine being opted for and the
amount used so far. There is an option of purchasing more capacity if required.

Account settings shows details of Quicksight account: notification email address, AWS
resource permissions to Quicksight, or you also have an option to close the account.

When you close Quicksight account, it deletes all the data related to below objects:

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 Data Sources
 Data Sets
 Analyses
 Published Dashboards

Manage VPC connection allows you to manage and add VPC connection to Quicksight. To
add a new VPC connection, you need to provide the following details:

Domains and embedding allows you to whitelist the domain on which you want to embed
Quicksight dashboards for the users. It only supports https:// domain to whitelist in
Quicksight:

https://example.com

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 AWS Quicksight

You can also include any subdomains if you want to use by selecting the checkbox shown
below. When you click on Add button, it adds the domain to the list of domain names
allowed in Quicksight for embedding.

To edit an allowed domain, you need to click on Edit button located beside the domain
name. You can make changes and click on Update.

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 15. AWS Quicksight — Edition Type AWS Quicksight

AWS Quicksight supports different editions which vary as per user management,
permissions and features supported — Standard and Enterprise. Both of these editions
support all the Quicksight features for creating and sharing data visualizations.

Enterprise edition offers support for Active Directory integration to AWS directory. There
are various other features which are supported in Enterprise edition as given below:

Features Supported Standard Edition Enterprise Edition

# of Free Authors 1 1
# of Free Trial Authors (60
4 4
Days)
Included SPICE Capacity 10 GB/User 10 GB/User
Readers N/A $0.30/session
Additional SPICE Capacity $0.25/GB/mo. $0.38/GB/mo.
Connect to spreadsheets,
databases, data lakes, and ✓ ✓
business apps
Easily analyze data with
✓ ✓
AutoGraph
Fast, scalable visualizations ✓ ✓
Publish dashboards for
✓ ✓
interactive data access
Single-Sign-On with SAML
✓ ✓
or OpenID Connect
Web and mobile access ✓ ✓
Drill-down to detail and
✓ ✓
customize filters
Enable audit logs with AWS
✓ ✓
CloudTrail
Reader Role ✓
Securely Access data in
✓
Private VPCs and On-Prem
Row Level Security ✓
Hourly refresh of SPICE
✓
data
Secure data encryption at
✓
rest
Connect to Active Directory ✓
Use Active Directory
✓
groups

You can check the subscription type of AWS Quicksight with Manage Quicksight option.

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 AWS Quicksight

In Enterprise edition, AWS Quicksight allows you to manage users using any of the below
ways:

 Using Microsoft Active Directory: In Enterprise edition, you can add/remove

Microsoft Active Directory groups to create and deactivate user accounts. You can
access the directory groups directly or by using the AD Connector.

 Federated logins

 Inviting users by email

To manage your AD users/groups in Quicksight, you have to navigate to Manage

Quicksight -> Manage users/Manage groups.

You can also change the role of an existing user by clicking on drop down list:

 Admin
 Author
 Reader

An AWS Quicksight administrator can also reset the password of an existing user using
Manage User option as shown below:

You can update from AQS Quicksight Standard edition to Enterprise edition using Manage
account option. To perform an upgrade, the user should have AWS Quicksight
administrator privilege.

Click on your profile icon at top right corner -> Upgrade now.

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Once you click on Upgrade, following screen appears. To complete the upgrade, click on
the Upgrade button.

Note: Once you change your subscription from Standard edition to Enterprise edition, you
cannot roll it back.

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16. AWS Quicksight ― Managing IAM Policies AWS Quicksight

To manage IAM policies for Quicksight account, you can use root user or IAM credentials.
It is recommended to use IAM credentials to manage resource access and policies instead
of root user.

Following policies are required to signup and use Amazon Quicksight:

Standard Edition
 ds:AuthorizeApplication
 ds:CheckAlias
 ds:CreateAlias
 ds:CreateIdentityPoolDirectory
 ds:DeleteDirectory
 ds:DescribeDirectories
 ds:DescribeTrusts
 ds:UnauthorizeApplication
 iam:CreatePolicy
 iam:CreateRole
 iam:ListAccountAliases
 quicksight:CreateUser
 quicksight:CreateAdmin
 quicksight:Subscribe

Enterprise Edition
Apart from the above mentioned policies, below permissions are required in enterprise
edition:

 quicksight:GetGroupMapping
 quicksight:SearchDirectoryGroups
 quicksight:SetGroupMapping

You can also allow a user to manage permissions for AWS resources in Quicksight.
Following IAM policies should be assigned in both editions:

 iam:AttachRolePolicy
 iam:CreatePolicy
 iam:CreatePolicyVersion
 iam:CreateRole
 iam:DeletePolicyVersion

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 AWS Quicksight

 iam:DeleteRole
 iam:DetachRolePolicy
 iam:GetPolicy
 iam:GetPolicyVersion
 iam:GetRole
 iam:ListAttachedRolePolicies
 iam:ListEntitiesForPolicy
 iam:ListPolicyVersions
 iam:ListRoles
 s3:ListAllMyBuckets

To prevent an AWS administrator to unsubscribe from Quicksight, you can deny all users
“quicksight:Unsubscribe”

IAM policy for dashboard embedding

To embed an AWS Quciksight dashboard URL in web page, you need the following IAM
policies to be assigned to the user:

{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Action": "quicksight:RegisterUser",
"Resource": "*",
"Effect": "Allow"
},
{
"Action": "quicksight:GetDashboardEmbedUrl",
"Resource": "arn:aws:quicksight:us-east-1: 868211930999:dashboard/
f2cb6cf2-477c-45f9-a1b3-639239eb95d8 ",
"Effect": "Allow"
}
]
}

You can manage and test these roles and policies using IAM policy simulator in Quicksight.
Below is the link to access IAM Policy simulator:

https://policysim.aws.amazon.com/home/index.jsp?#

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AWS Quicksight

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17. AWS Quicksight — Embedding Dashboard AWS Quicksight

You can also embed your Quicksight dashboards into external applications/web pages or
can control user access using AWS Cognito service. To perform user control, you can create
user pool and identity pool in Cognito and assign Embed dashboard policies to identity
pool.

AWS Cognito is an IAM service which allows administrators to create and manage
temporary users to provide access to applications. With the use of identity pool, you can
manage permissions on these user pools.

Let us see how we can generate secure dashboard URL and perform user control:

Step 1: Creating user pools and users

Create user pool in AWS Cognito and create users. Go to Amazon Cognito -> Manage
User Pools -> Create a User Pool.

Step 2: Creating an identity pool

When user pool is created, next step is to create an identity pool. Go to
https://console.aws.amazon.com/cognito/home?region=us-east-1

Click on “Create New Identity Pool”.

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 AWS Quicksight

Enter the appropriate name of an identity pool. Go to the Authentication Providers section
and select “Cognito” option.

Step 3: Creating Cognito roles

Enter the User Pool ID (your User pool ID) and App Client ID (go to App Clients in user
pool and copy id).

Next is to click on ‘Create Pool’ and click on ‘Allow’ to create roles of the identity pool in
IAM. It will create 2 Cognito roles.

Step 4: Assigning Custom Policy

Next step is to assign custom policy to identity roles created in the above step:
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 AWS Quicksight

{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Action": "quicksight:RegisterUser",
"Resource": "*",
"Effect": "Allow"
},
{
"Action": "quicksight:GetDashboardEmbedUrl",
"Resource": "*",
"Effect": "Allow"
},
{
"Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
"Resource": "*",
"Effect": "Allow"
}
]
}

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 AWS Quicksight

You can pass dashboard Amazon Resource Name (ARN) under

quicksight:GetDashboardEmbedUrl” instead of “*” to restrict user to access only one
dashboard.

Step 5: Logging into Cognito application

Next step is to login to Cognito application with user credentials in user pool. When user
logins into application, Cognito generates 3 tokens:

 IDToken
 AccessToken
 Refresh Token

To create a temporary IAM user, credentials are as shown below:

AWS.config.region = 'us-east-1';
AWS.config.credentials = new AWS.CognitoIdentityCredentials({
IdentityPoolId:"Identity pool ID",
Logins: {
'cognito-idp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/UserPoolID': AccessToken
}
});

For generating temporary IAM credentials, you need to call sts.assume role method with
the below parameters:

var params = {
RoleArn: "Cognito Identity role arn",
RoleSessionName: "Session name"
};
sts.assumeRole(params, function (err, data) {
if (err) console.log( err, err.stack); // an error occurred
else {
console.log(data);
})

Step 6: Registering the user in Quicksight

Next step is to register the user in Quicksight using “quicksight.registerUser” for
credentials generated in step 3 with the below parameters:

var params = {
AwsAccountId: “account id”,
Email: 'email',
IdentityType: 'IAM' ,
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 AWS Quicksight

Namespace: 'default',
UserRole: ADMIN | AUTHOR | READER | RESTRICTED_AUTHOR |
RESTRICTED_READER,
IamArn: 'Cognito Identity role arn',
SessionName: 'session name given in the assume role
creation',
};
quicksight.registerUser(params, function (err, data1) {
if (err) console.log("err register user”); // an error
occurred
else {
// console.log("Register User1”);
}
})

Step 7: Updating AWS Configuration file

Next is to update AWS configuration for user generated in step 5.

AWS.config.update({
accessKeyId: AccessToken,
secretAccessKey: SecretAccessKey ,
sessionToken: SessionToken,
"region": Region
});

Step 8: Generating embed URL for Quicksight dashboard

With credentials created in step 5, call the quicksight.getDashboardEmbedUrl with the
below parameters to generate URL.

var params = {
AwsAccountId: "Enter AWS account ID",
DashboardId: "Enter dashboard Id",
IdentityType: "IAM",
ResetDisabled: true,
SessionLifetimeInMinutes: between 15 to 600 minutes,
UndoRedoDisabled: True | False
}
quicksight.getDashboardEmbedUrl(params,

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 AWS Quicksight

function (err, data) {

if (!err) {
console.log(data);
} else {
console.log(err);
}
});

You have to call “QuickSightEmbedding.embedDashboard” from your application using the

above generated URL.

Like Amazon Quicksight, embedded dashboard also supports the following features:

 Drill-down option
 Custom actions (link to a new tab)
 On-screen filters
 Download to CSV
 Sorting on visuals
 Email report opt-in
 Reset dashboard to defaults option
 Undo/redo actions on the dashboard

47
 18. AWS Quicksight ― AWS SDKs AWS Quicksight

You can use AWS Quicksight SDK’s to manage the following:

 User and group management

 Embedding dashboards

Following shows a sample HTML code to be used to display an embedded dashboard:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title> Sample Embed</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://unpkg.com/amazon-quicksight-
[email protected]/dist/quicksight-embedding-js-sdk.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
function embedDashboard() {
var containerDiv = document.getElementById("dashboardContainer");
var params = {
url: "https://us-east-
1.quicksight.aws.amazon.com/sn/dashboards/xxx-x-x-xx-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-xx-xx-x-xx",
container: containerDiv,
parameters: {
country: 'United States'
},
height: "600px",
width: "800px"
};
var dashboard = QuickSightEmbedding.embedDashboard(params);
dashboard.on('error', function() {});
dashboard.on('load', function() {});
dashboard.setParameters({country: 'Canada'});
}
</script>
</head>

To use AWS SDK’s, you should be familiar with the following:

 JSON

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 AWS Quicksight

 Web services
 HTTP requests
 One or more programming languages, such as JavaScript, Java, Python, or C#.

49
19. AWS Quicksight — Developer Responsibilities AWS Quicksight

Following job responsibilities are performed by an AWS Quicksight developer:

 Person should have relevant work experience in analytics, reporting and business
intelligence tools.

 Understanding customer requirements and design solution in AWS to setup ETL and
Business Intelligence environment.

 Understanding different AWS services, their use and configuration.

 Proficient in using SQL, ETL, Data Warehouse solutions and databases in a business
environment with large-scale, disparate datasets.

 Complex quantitative and data analysis skills

 Understanding AWS IAM policies, roles and administrator of AWS services

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