Happy New Year lovely readers!! I hope you had a nice break and are now excited to see what 2020 has in store for the glamorous world of FinOps! So let's kick things off with a quick post about the AWS cloud-based business intelligence (BI) tool, QuickSight .
Now, in the industry, there are many well-known and useful BI tools available such as Tableau, Powered BI and Qlik Sense . I actually got to use Tableau quite a bit in my Masters and understand how useful and important these tools are. So, why am I veering away from the tools that sit in Gartner's magic quadrant, to something different?
Well, there’s a couple of reasons, but the main one is, I am lazy.
Ok, I am not actually lazy but sometimes I prefer the simpler, lower maintenance work that will get the job done and be equally cost effective (could that be used to describe FinOps?).
When I wrote my dissertation on Cost Optimisation and Visualisation in the Cloud I did look at these tools. However, I came to the conclusion that if I wanted something that was simple to set up and manage, in a short amount of time, that could connect to my data already directly stored in the AWS cloud, then QuickSight seemed like the perfect option.
Amazon’s description of the tool is as follows: “As a fully managed service, QuickSight lets you easily create and publish interactive dashboards that include ML Insights. Dashboards can then be accessed from any device, and embedded into your applications, portals, and websites. With our Pay-per-Session pricing, QuickSight allows you to give everyone access to the data they need, while only paying for what you use.”
So why is it so good:
● Cost - $9/user/mo with annual subscription
● No installation, patching or maintenance
● No additional storage costs as it is in your AWS Account
● Simple to get to grips with
● Plug Straight into AWS tools
Bringing this back to FinOps, I use QuickSight to visualise my billing data and you can read a much more detailed blog post from AWS on how to do this here.
Now, when I first started using QuickSight I had some real issues with setting up data sources/ sets and just getting started. I was probably just doing it wrong. So I thought “Lets automate it!”
Finally AWS have released an API for QuickSight.
Therefore, I created a script to create a data source and from that a set for Athena and the cost and usage report.
I have used this in the setup with Penny but if you are just interested in playing with QuickSight and you prefer the coded way (the right way), then hopefully this can help.
Also it’s worth noting there is a workshop being held in London this month if you are looking to get some more hands on experience with QuickSight.