Quick Sight FAQs

Amazon Quick Sight delivers AI-powered BI capabilities in Quick Suite transforming data into strategic insights for everyone, enabling faster decisions and better business outcomes. Quick Sight provides unified intelligence across all enterprise data sources, that makes it easier for all employees within an organization to build visualizations, perform ad hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from their data, anytime, on any device. Quick Sight enables organizations to scale their business analytics capabilities to hundreds of thousands of users, and delivers fast and responsive query performance by using a robust in-memory engine: SPICE.

Traditional BI solutions create significant barriers for organizations. These legacy systems require teams of data analysts and engineers to spend months building complex data models before generating dashboards or reports. They also demand substantial upfront investments in expensive hardware and software, plus ongoing infrastructure costs to maintain performance as databases grow. This cost and complexity prevents widespread adoption across organizations.

Quick Sight addresses these challenges by providing a cloud-native AI-powered BI across all enterprise data sources. Organizations pay a simple monthly fee per user instead of expensive long-term licenses, while built-in agents bridge the gap between insights and action through research and automation capabilities. Quick Suite extends Quick Sight's business intelligence capabilities by creating an AI-powered digital workplace. Quick Suite integrates research capabilities, data-driven insights, and automation tools into a single experience. Business users at every skill level are empowered with AI agents that streamline complex tasks, enabling faster decision-making. Users can now find critical information across data sources in minutes rather than days, analyze data using natural language queries, create sophisticated visualizations without technical expertise, and act on insights without switching tools. Quick Suite handles repetitive tasks through automation while maintaining enterprise-grade security and governance standards throughout the organization.

Quick Sight is built with SPICE—a Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine. 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. SPICE supports rich calculations to help you derive valuable insights from your analysis without worrying about provisioning or managing infrastructure. Data in SPICE is persisted until it is explicitly deleted by the user. SPICE also automatically replicates data for high availability and enables Quick Sight to scale to hundreds of thousands of users who can all simultaneously perform fast interactive analysis across a wide variety of AWS data sources.

Customers interested in exploring Quick Sight’s BI capabilities can take advantage of the Quick Suite free trial which includes all features for 30 days for  up to 25 users per account.

A Quick Sight Author is a user who can connect to data sources (within AWS or outside), create visuals and analyze data. Authors can create interactive dashboards using advanced Quick Sight capabilities such as parameters and calculated fields, and publish dashboards with other users in the account. There are two types of Author licenses in Quick Sight – Author and Author Pro. Author Pro Includes all Author capabilities and adds generative I including capabilities to build dashboards with natural language, create Q Topics, executive dashboard summaries and to build and share generative data stories. For billing purposes individuals who administer a Quick Sight account will need to be an Author or Author Pro. In regions where new Quick Suite capabilities are available, Author Pros get all the capabilities of Quick Suite Enterprise and Authors get promotional access to all capabilities of Quick Suite Enterprise till April 30, 2026.

A Quick Sight Reader is a user who consumes interactive dashboards. Readers can log in via their organization’s preferred authentication mechanism, view shared dashboards, filter data, drill down to details or export data as a CSV file, using a web browser or mobile app. Readers do not have any allocated SPICE capacity.

Individual end-users can be provisioned to access Quick Sight as Readers. Reader pricing applies to manual session interactions only. We reserve the right charge for the reader at the higher monthly author rate if, in our discretion, we determine that you are using reader sessions for other types of use (for example, programmatic or automated queries).

There are two types of Reader accounts – Reader and Reader Pro. Reader Pro Includes all Reader capabilities plus generative AI capabilities in Amazon Q including executive dashboard summaries and capability to build and share generative data stories.

In regions where new Quick Suite capabilities are available, Quick Sight Reader Pro users will have access to and can use all capabilities of Quick Suite Professional.

No, Readers and Reader Pro are only available in Amzon Quick Sight Enterprise Edition. If you have a Standard Edition account, you can upgrade to Enterprise Edition using the Quick Sight management page.

A Quick Sight Admin is a user who can manage Quick Sight users and account-level preferences, as well as purchase SPICE capacity and annual subscriptions for the account. Admins also have all Quick Sight authoring capabilities. Admins can also upgrade Standard Edition accounts to Enterprise Edition if needed. For billing purposes, Quick Sight Authors and Admins are both recognized as Authors.

No, Quick Sight Authors and Readers are user types that cannot change account permissions or invite more users. Quick Sight offers an Admin user, who can manage Quick Sight users and account-level preferences, as well as purchase SPICE capacity and annual subscriptions for the account. Admins also have all Quick Sight authoring capabilities. Admins can also upgrade Standard Edition accounts to Enterprise Edition if needed.

Quick Sight mobile apps (available on iOS and Android) gives instant access to your data and insights for you to make decisions on the go. Browse, search and interact with your dashboards. Add dashboards to Favorites for quick and easy access. Explore your data with drill downs, filtering and more. You can also use a web browser on any mobile device to access Quick Sight.

Quick Sight supports the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer version 10 and above, and Edge.

Customers interested in exploring Quick Sight’s BI capabilities can take advantage of the Quick Suite free trial which includes all features for 30 days for  up to 25 users per account.

We provision dedicated hardware capacity underneath the hood per customer to provide you agentic AI capabilities and consistently fast query performance. This foundational fee powers the robust infrastructure that delivers Quick Suite's seamless experience across all features and capabilities. The Infrastructure fee is billed per account per month and is billed each month that there are Pro users or Topics within the account.

No. Customers pay the $250/month infrastructure fee per account even if the account spans multiple Regions.

Yes, you can purchase Amazon Q questions in bulk with Amazon Q questions capacity pricing. Quick Sight Author Pro users can create and manage Q Topics allowing Q&A on specific data. Additional Amazon Q capabilities are currently only available through fixed-price Pro user roles.

Capacity pricing is beneficial when  dashboards need to be displayed to a large audience with dispersed usage, or in situations where the user population is expected to continually grow. In both cases, the discounts on per-session pricing available with Capacity pricing allow reduction in BI costs over time. Each session within session Capacity pricing is 30 minutes long. Session Capacity pricing also allows use of Quick Sight capabilities for programmatic access for display on large screens or monitors for consumption by multiple end users.

You can connect to AWS data sources including Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena and Amazon S3. You can also upload Excel spreadsheets or flat files (CSV, TSV, CLF, and ELF), connect to on-premises databases like SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL and import data from SaaS applications like Salesforce. We continuously add new data sources to Quick Sight. You can find the latest list of supported data sources here.

Yes. To connect Quick Sight to an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or on-premises database, you need to add the Amazon Quick Sight IP range to the authorized list in your hosted database.

You can upload XLSX, CSV, TSV, CLF, XLF data files directly from the Quick Sight website. You can also upload them to an Amazon S3 bucket and point Quick Sight to the S3 object.

Quick Sight seamlessly discovers your AWS data sources that are available in your account with your approval. You can immediately start browsing the data and building visualizations. You can also explicitly connect to other AWS data sources that are not in your account or in a different region by providing connection details for those sources.

Quick Sight lets you prepare data that is not ready for visualization. Select the “Edit/Preview Data” button in the connection dialog. Quick Sight supports various functions to format and transform your data. You can alias data fields and change data types. You can subset your data using built in filters and perform database join operations using drag and drop. You can also create calculated fields using mathematical operations and built-in functions such conditional statements, string, numerical and date functions.

With Quick Sight, you don’t need to worry about scale. You can seamlessly grow your data from a few hundred megabytes to many terabytes of data without managing any infrastructure.

The first step is to connect the data source from which you want to pull data. Once you’re connected to a data source, select the “Augment with SageMaker” option. From there, you pick the model you want to use from a list of SageMaker models in your AWS account and provide the schema file, which is a JSON-formatted file that contains the input, output, and runtime settings. Review the input schema mapping with the columns in your data set. Once you’re done, you can execute this job and start running the inference.

Quick Sight does inference on the full data every time it refreshes.

When you create a new Quick Sight account, you have administrative privileges by default. If you are invited to become an Quick Sight user, whoever invites you assigns you either an ADMIN or a USER role. If you have an ADMIN role, you can create and delete user accounts, purchase annual subscriptions and SPICE capacity in addition to using the service. To create a user account, you send an email invitation to the user via an in-application interface, and then the user completes the account creation by specifying a password and signing in.

Creating an analysis is simple. Quick Sight seamlessly discovers data in popular AWS data repositories within your AWS account. Simply point Quick Sight to one of the discovered data sources. To connect to another AWS data source that is not in your AWS account or in a different Region, you can provide the connection details of the source. Then, select a table and start analyzing your data. You can also upload spreadsheets and CSV files and use Quick Sight to analyze your files. To create a visualization, start by selecting the data fields you want to analyze, or drag the fields directly on to the visual canvas, or a combination of both actions. Quick Sight will automatically select the appropriate visualization to display based on the data you’ve selected.

Quick Sight has an innovative technology called AutoGraph that allows it to select the most appropriate visualizations based on the properties of the data, such as cardinality and data type. The visualization types are chosen to best reveal the data and relationships in an effective way.

Dashboards are a collection of visualizations, tables, and other visual displays arranged and visible together. With Quick Sight, you can compose a dashboard within an analysis by arranging the layouts and size of visualizations and then publish the dashboard to an audience within your organization. Or even better if you have Generative BI enabled, you can use Amazon Q and reduce the time it takes to build a dashboard from hours to minutes.

Quick Sight supports assorted visualizations that facilitate different analytical approaches: 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.

Quick Sight comes with a built-in suggestion engine that provides you with suggested visualizations based on the properties of the underlying datasets. Suggestions serve as possible first or next-steps of an analysis and removes the time-consuming task of interrogating and understanding the schema of your data. As you work with more specific data, the suggestions will update to reflect the next steps appropriate to your current analysis.

Stories are guided tours through specific views of an analysis. They are used to convey key points, a thought process, or the evolution of an analysis for collaboration. You can construct them in Quick Sight by capturing and annotating specific states of the analysis. When readers of the story select an image in the story, they are then taken into the analysis at that point, where they can explore on their own.

You can perform typical arithmetic and comparison functions; conditional functions such as if,then; and date, numeric, and string calculations.

Today, Billing and Cost Management offers direct integration with Quick Sight, which automates creation of the Cost and Usage Dashboard that you can use to gain insights into AWS spend. This dashboard is inspired by the open source project, Cloud Intelligence Dashboards (CID). The Cost and Usage Dashboard brings the benefits of CID to the Billing and Cost Management console as an AWS supported feature and removes the need for maintaining underlying infrastructure like Amazon Athena views or AWS Glue crawlers. You can deploy the Cost and Usage Dashboard from the Data Exports page in the Billing and Cost Management console.

For your convenience, sample analyses are automatically generated when you create an account in Amazon Quick Sight. The raw data can also be downloaded from the links below: Business overview People overview Sales pipeline Web and marketing analytics These datasets were created by 47Lining, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with Big Data Competency designation.

You have several options to get your data into Quick Sight: file upload, connect to AWS data sources, connect to external data stores over JDBC/ODBC, or through other API-based data store connectors.

Yes. For better performance and user interactivity, customers are advised to use the region where your data is stored. The Quick Sight auto discovery feature detects data sources only within the Region of the Quick Sight endpoint to which you are connected. For a list of the supported Quick Sight Regions, visit Regional Products and Services for all AWS global infrastructure.

Yes. You can enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your AWS account using the AWS Management Console.

If your VPC has been set up with public connectivity, you can add a Quick Sight IP address range to your database instances’ security group rules to enable traffic flow into your VPC and database instances.

Row-level security (RLS) enables Quick Sight dataset owners to control access to data at row granularity based on permissions associated with the user interacting with the data. With RLS, Quick Sight users only need to manage a single set of data and apply appropriate row-level dataset rules to it. All associated dashboards and analyses will enforce these rules, simplifying dataset management and removing the need to maintain multiple datasets for users with different data access privileges.

If you have data in AWS (perhaps in Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, or on EC2) or on-premises in Teradata or SQL Server on servers without public connectivity, this feature is for you. Private VPC (virtual private cloud) Access for Quick Sight uses an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) for secure, private communication with data sources in a VPC. It also allows you to use AWS Direct Connect to create a secure, private link with your on-premises resources.

You can share an analysis, dashboard, or story using the share icon in Quick Suite interface. You will be able to select the recipients (email address, username or group name), permission levels, and other options before sharing the content with others.

Yes, Standard Edition account accounts can be upgraded to Enterprise Edition through the Quick Sight management page. Existing authentication details and user data will be seamlessly migrated to Enterprise Edition. Enterprise Edition rates for user and SPICE capacity will apply.

No, you will not be able to downgrade from  Quick Sight Enterprise Edition to Standard Edition.  Quick Sight Enterprise Edition offers enhanced functionality such as Quick Sight Readers, connectivity to data sources in Private VPC, row-level security, hourly refresh of SPICE data as well as AD connectivity and group-based management of assets for AD accounts. Due to the differences in feature set, a downgrade might result in loss of data connectivity and security, and as a result, this option is not supported.