Tableau with AWS: Business Intelligence and Data Analysis of a Higher Order

Benefits of AWS Cost Optimization

Optimizing AWS costs is a vital part of effectively utilizing AWS services. Businesses can leverage the wide array of AWS services and pricing models to learn how to optimize costs and save considerable amounts of money. AWS Cost Optimization offers several key benefits to organizations looking to manage and reduce cloud expenses while maximizing efficiency. Let's take a look at the benefits of cost optimization with AWS: Enhanced flexibility: AWS offers flexible and cost-effective purchase plans like Reserved Instances or Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, enabling businesses to select the suitable pricing models that best fit their requirements. Boosted efficiency in resource utilization: Allocate resources effectively by rightsizing your instances, identifying the optimal size for your compute workloads, selecting the right data storage and transfer options, and eliminating unused resources. This prevents overprovisioning and ensures optimal usage of available services. Increased cost savings: AWS identifies unused resources and helps businesses scale down their infrastructure, reducing cloud costs and saving big. AWS cost optimization also ensures that you pay only for what you need, enhancing the efficiency of your cloud operations. Improved budgeting and forecasting: AWS Cost Optimization gives businesses greater visibility into spending patterns, enabling them to forecast costs and create accurate and realistic budgets based on seasonal trends, historical usage patterns, and business growth projections. Increased scalability: By employing cost optimization strategies, businesses can seamlessly scale resources on demand and pay for the requirement only when needed. Optimizing costs for seasonal fluctuations, changing workloads, and business growth ensures scalability in your AWS environment.

A Quick Look into AWS Cloud Cost Optimization Tools

AWS Cost Explorer: A tool that offers insights into the cost and usage of AWS services by giving a detailed picture of AWS spending. Its benefits include: • Identifying areas where costs are optimized • Forecasting future costs • Planning and budgeting AWS costs AWS Budgets: A tool that allows users to create custom cost and usage budgets for AWS services. It enables users to take corrective action by sending alerts when cost and usage thresholds exceed. Its benefits include: • Handling AWS spend by setting and monitoring budgets • Avoiding unforeseen expenses and cost overruns • Providing suggestions for cost optimization AWS Trusted Advisor: A tool offering tailored recommendations for optimizing AWS costs, performance, and security. It is free of charge for all AWS users. Its benefits include: • Delivering actionable insights from usage data • Offering personalized recommendations from usage data • Identifying areas where costs can be lowered AWS Pricing Calculator: A tool that helps users get estimates before choosing a service and enables the assessment of calculations based on the estimates. Its benefits include: • Identifying possible areas for cost-saving • Planning budget effectively • Providing insights into the costs you expect for a service

Optimizing Cloud Costs with AWS Cost Explorer

A robust tool that enables users to visualize, analyze, and monitor AWS costs, AWS Cost Explorer offers a granular view of your AWS spending and usage. It allows you to track your spending over time, detect cost trends, and investigate specific resources to understand where the money is spent. Cost Explorer provides a detailed report on cost, usage, and Reserved Instances and a main graph that helps you drill down into costs and usage. Users can access data for up to the last thirteen months, get suggestions for RI purchases, and predict expenses for the next twelve months. Besides, Cost Explorer offers insights into user spending by identifying areas for examination. Users can also set up preconfigured views to track overall cost trends while customizing views to align with user requirements. AWS Cost Explorer has some incredible features that assist you in comprehending and managing your spending. Data Exploration: Access AWS Cost Explorer directly from the Billing and Cost Management console. With the ability to filter and group data by dimensions such as service, usage type, region, and tags, you can dive deep into specific areas and identify key cost drivers. Report Generation: Build custom reports to monitor your costs and usage trends over time. These reports can be saved and scheduled for regular updates, offering continuous insights into your spending patterns. Costs Forecasting: Leverage Cost Explorer's forecasting feature to predict future expenses based on historical data. The predictive faculty supports better budget planning and more efficient resource allocation. Businesses that do not optimize costs can face higher costs, inefficient use wastage of resources, and severe impact on profit. Therefore, AWS cost optimization is essential for utilizing cloud resources efficiently and cost-effectively, potentially saving money for businesses in the long run. The benefits of cost optimization include lowering costs, offering predictability, preventing unforeseen expenses and cost overruns, and enhancing resource utilization, which drives business growth and sustainability.

What is AWS Security Hub?

AWS Security Hub offers a unified, organized, and prioritized view of the compliance status and security posture of your AWS accounts in a standardized format. It automates the security best practice checks of single and multiple AWS accounts. It centralizes the security alerts into one format and place, helping you comprehend the security framework of your AWS environment. It offers a pre-built dashboard that helps manage and prioritize any alerts or issues in your AWS environment found from security checks. Security Hub assesses security controls, performs compliance checks, and generates control findings to gauge your organization's adherence to security best practices. By automating security best practice checks, Security Hub streamlines the understanding and enhancing of the security posture of your AWS accounts. It offers multiple security standards to handle your organization's security position, including Foundational Security Best Practices developed by AWS and external compliance frameworks like Center for Internet Security (CIS) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). These standards have various security controls, each defining a security best practice. Besides generating control findings, Security Hub acquires findings from AWS services like Amazon Inspector and Amazon GuardDuty and also supports third-party products, offering a centralized view of several security-related issues. Also, the automation capabilities of the Security Hub simplified the triage and remediation of security issues. For example, by setting automation rules, critical discoveries get updated automatically in case of a security check failure.

Features of AWS Security Hub

Centralized Cloud Security Management: It offers a unified dashboard that tracks security findings from AWS services like AWS Config and third-party tools, enhancing and prioritizing them in a single place. Third-Party Integration: AWS Security Hub seamlessly integrates with third-party tools like Splunk, consolidating data from multiple sources into a unified view. Tailored Security Insights: It enables the customization of security insights and alerts, allowing organizations to adapt their security posture to specific needs. Automated Compliance and Security Checks: By automating compliance and security checks on AWS accounts, resources, and services, AWS Security Hub enables the detection of security issues, continuous monitoring, and evaluation while ensuring they adhere to industry best practices and standards.

Top Benefits of AWS Security Hub

• Streamlines managing cloud security by centralizing all security data in a single place, offering a consolidated view that helps detect possible threats. • Enhances real-time threat detection by facilitating integration with AWS services like Amazon GuardDuty. • Ensures regulatory compliance by fulfilling the industry security criteria and standards • Conducts constant security checks by following industry standards and practices to identify and monitor AWS accounts and resources that need attention, flagging any misconfigurations in security. • Enables automated remediation for specific findings and customized actions triggered upon detection. In short, AWS Security Hub enhances cloud security by centralizing monitoring of accounts, services, and resources, performing automated security assessments, enabling businesses to comply with security standards, and integrating with AWS services for real-time threat detection. It can be quite difficult to manage security in complex cloud environments, but AWS Security Hub streamlines the process by delivering real-time security insights into your AWS environment, consolidating security alerts from different tools into a unified view, and automating security checks to enhance protection and efficiency. As an AWS consulting partner, Beinex offers AWS-managed services to our customers to host their BI solutions and more on the cloud. Our cloud migration experts ensure top-tier stability and reliability by aligning with your business strategy and collaborating closely with you to deploy AWS infrastructure as a service seamlessly. Connect with us for a free demo: https://beinex.com/beinex-amazon-web-services/

The Primary Means to Narrate Stories in Tableau

We can represent the visuals using the following three formats on Tableau:

1. Sheets: Spaces where we can build individual visuals are called sheets. A worksheet has a single view in its sidebar, as well as shelves, cards, legends, and the Data and Analytics panes. A workbook is a sheet file structure along the lines of Microsoft Excel. It includes sheets that can function as a worksheet, a dashboard, or even a story

Source: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/inspectdata_describe.htm

2. Dashboards: Most commonly used reporting format, a dashboard is a layout where sheets are arranged in a meaningful manner. It is a collection of views that helps you to compare a variety of data at the same time. If you have a set of views that should be reviewed every day, then you can create a dashboard that displays all of the views at once rather than navigating to separate worksheets. Think of the efficiency gains that this can bring about.

Source: https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2020/5/6-dashboards-tableau-partners-help-you-mitigate-covid-19

3. Story:Sheets or dashboards arranged in a sequence to convey information. A story is a collection of visuals that work together to convey information. Stories can be created to tell a data narrative, provide context, show how decisions affect outcomes, or simply make a compelling case.

Source: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/stories

Default Charts in Tableau

Through a set of default charts created with Tableau, data sets can be displayed in a comprehensible way. Let's have a look at a few types of charts:

1. Area Chart:An area chart is a line chart with a colour shaded area between the line and the axis. These charts constitute the most common approach to illustrate stacked lines and are often used to represent accumulated totals over time.

Source: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/qs_area_charts.htm

2. Bar Chart:Place a dimension on the Rows shelf and a measure on the Columns shelf to make a bar chart or vice versa. We may compare numerical data such as integers and percentages using bar charts. Each variable's value is represented by the length of each bar. Bar charts, for example, might demonstrate how much money a small business spends on various expenses.

Source: https://www.tableau.com/data-insights/reference-library/visual-analytics/charts/bar-charts

3. Box-and-whisker Plots:When demonstrating the distribution of data points across a specified metric, box-and-whisker plots, also known as box plots, are an excellent chart to employ. The ranges within the variables measured are represented in these graphs. These graphics are useful for comparing the distributions of multiple variables.

Source: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/buildexamples_boxplot.htm

4. Bubble cloud: In bubble clouds, data is displayed in a cluster of circles. Individual bubbles are defined by dimensions, while individual circles are defined by measures. A bubble chart's design allows it to display multiple variables. Individual bubbles represent dimension field values, while measure field values define the size and colour of the bubble. As a result, we can examine a plot with at least three variables, one dimension and two measure fields.

Source: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/buildexamples_bubbles.htm

5. Bullet Graph:Bullet graphs are a type of bar graph that was created to replace dashboard gauges and metres. When comparing the performance of a major metric to one or more other measures, a bullet graph is beneficial. A bullet graph can help you visualise your objective, the current data set, and past data sets; all in one visualisation if you have a target goal that you need to meet on a regular basis

Source: https://www.tableau.com/data-insights/reference-library/visual-analytics/charts/bullet-graph

6. Cartogram:Choropleth Maps, also known as Filled Maps, are a powerful tool for studying geographic data, especially for maps with a lot of detail (e.g., US by counties or ZIP codes). They make it simple to detect geographical hotspots and then drill down into these areas using several visualisation options.

Source: https://www.pluralsight.com/guides/build-filled-maps-in-tableau

7. Click View:The circle view is a useful representation for comparative analysis. It's the same as using the circle marker on a scatter plot. Every mark is in the shape of a circle and can be used for subsequent actions.

Source:https://interworks.com/blog/ccapitula/2014/10/17/tableau-essentials-chart-types-circle-view/

8. Gantt Chart:Gantt charts are used in project management to depict the length of time between events or activities. As a project management tool, it highlights the interdependencies between activities and illuminates the workflow timeline.

Source:https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/buildexamples_gantt.htm

9. Heat Map:In a heat map, data is displayed along with colours. Using one or more Dimensions members and the Measure value, a heat map can be created. Heat Map helps to compare data by colour. For example, how many products have failed to meet the company's expectations, and how many products have exceeded expectations, and so on.

Source:https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/buildexamples_highlight.htm

10. Histogram:A histogram is a graph that depicts a distribution's form. It divides values for a continuous metric into bins and segregates a set of data points into user-specified ranges. The histogram, which resembles a bar graph in appearance, condenses a data series into an easily interpreted visual by grouping many data points into logical ranges or bins.

Source: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/buildexamples_histogram.htm

11. Scatter Plot (2D or 3D):Scatter plots are a type of graph that is used to show the correlations between numerical data. They are used to depict the link between three variables by plotting data points on three axes. Each column on the X, Y, and Z axes is represented by a marker, whose position is determined by the values in the columns.

Source: https://www.dataplusscience.com/TabCharts/scatterplotsize.html

12. Streamgraph:Streamgraph shows how a number value (Y-axis) changes in response to another numeric value (X-axis). It is a sort of stacked area chart. The relative proportions of the entire can be studied using a stream chart.

Source: https://greatified.com/2018/09/17/how-to-build-a-stream-graph-in-tableau-software/

13. Text Tables:Text tables (also called cross-tabs or pivot tables) are created by placing one dimension on the Rows shelf and another dimension on the Columns shelf. Then, on the Marks card, slide one or more measures to Text to complete the view.

Source: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/buildexamples_text.htm#:~:text

14. Treemap:Treemaps are used to show data in the form of nested rectangles. Dimensions define the structure of the treemap, while measures define the size or colour of the individual rectangles. It is a simple data visualisation that can provide information in a visually appealing format.

Source: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/buildexamples_treemap.htm

15. Word Cloud:The word cloud is an excellent visual for representing the frequency of words in a given volume of Text. In a word cloud, the most important or unique words from the data are arranged in groups. The main goal of making a word cloud is to provide the viewer with a quick understanding of the important and unique words in the data.

Source: https://www.edupristine.com/blog/creating-word-cloud-tableau

Custom Visuals in Tableau

Tableau also provides a range of custom visuals. Creating them is just a question of one's expertise in Tableau.

1. Dot Distribution Map: Maps that help to spot visual clusters are known as point or dot distribution maps. Dot distribution maps are excellent for displaying how data points are dispersed.

Source: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/maps_howto_pointdistribution.htm

2. Network:Nodes and edges make up a network graph. By connecting nodes with similar features, network visualisations show relationships between items. A network graph is a type of data visualisation that allows consumers to quickly grasp data relationships. Nodes are single data points with edges connecting them to other nodes. The relationship between two or more nodes is represented by edges. This enables the user to easily visualise clusters and establish linkages.

Source: https://ladataviz.com/2019/12/15/build-a-network-graph-in-tableau-in-three-steps/

3. Polar Area:The Polar Area Chart, also known as the Coxcomb chart, resembles a pie chart except that all of the slices have the same angle and the length of the slice that extends spirally from the centre represents quantity.

Source: https://tableau.toanhoang.com/creating-a-polar-chart-in-tableau/

4. Radial Tree:A radial bar chart is a type of pie chart. Like a pie chart, it depicts the relationship of parts to the whole, but it can also include subcategories for each part of the total. Each category in the data series plotted in a radial bar chart is assigned a different colour, whereas all subcategories are assigned the same colour.

Source:https://boraberan.wordpress.com/2014/12/31/radial-treemaps-bar-charts-in-tableau/

5. Timeline:The timeline chart, as the name implies, depicts the significant events that occur in the month, year, or even day. The timeline can also be used as a calendar to display forthcoming events.

Source: https://playfairdata.com/how-to-make-a-timeline-in-tableau/

• List the unused data sources: Data sources imported in a workbook but not used are highlighted by the new feature. The developer can remove these data sources from the data source list to make the workbook faster.
• List of unused fields or data columns: Just like the data sources, workbook optimizer also highlights the data columns not used across the workbook. Removing these at the data source level can help improve the overall performance of the workbook.
• List of sheets not used in the dashboard: It is a common practise that developers tend to create sheets not used in the final dashboard. This creates unnecessary clutter and makes the dashboard slower. The workbook optimiser feature gives a list of such sheets which the user can delete to optimise the performance of the workbook further.
• Highlights lengthy calculations: The feature provides a list of calculations which are too complex and in turn reduce the performance of the dashboard. Simplifying a few of these can improve performance to a great extent.

The user will see a screen like below as part of the workbook optimizer. Ask Data Phrase Builder: This feature is available on Tableau Server and Tableau Online Add field would look like as shown in the below screenshot: Customize View Data: This feature is available on Tableau Server, Desktop and Tableau Online This feature enables to reshape the tabular data behind your visualisation in the View data interface. One can create new columns, remove columns from the default view, change the order and sort the data using this feature. This reshaped data can also be exported as csv file to be shared with the team. Change the root table: This feature is available on Tableau Server, Desktop and Tableau Online Managing multiple data tables becomes easier and flexible with this new feature. One can swap any table to be the root table with a single click. This allows one to change the layout of the table quickly, reshape the data with a different root table and delete a specific table without deleting child nodes. For e.g., let us assume a user had to create a data source for an analysis using 3 tables namely ‘customers’, ‘orders’ and ‘returns’. The user creates the data model such that ‘customers’ is the root table followed by ‘orders’ and ‘returns’. But after performing some analysis the user realises that ‘orders’ should be the main root table. In such cases the user would have to re-create the data again from scratch but with the new ‘Swap with root table’ feature user can do the changes with a few clicks. Parameter Enhancements in Tableau Prep In version 2022.1 Tableau Prep is adding even more places where one can use parameters in the flow as well as user enhancements. Now, one can:

• Get a list of all the parameters in one place rather than finding them in the flow. One can delete these parameters directly from the parameter window rather than to find it in the flow first.
• Include parameter names in exported output files.
• Include parameters in SQL scripts that you run before or after writing the flow output to a database. Include parameters in worksheet names when writing the flow output to Microsoft Excel.

New Visualisation Toolbar: Available on Tableau Online and Server The new feature enhances the user dashboard navigation in Tableau Online and Tableau Server. Also, the new toolbar supports embedding for your external applications. However, the available functionality within the toolbar will vary based on the user’s access level. TabPy Model Evaluation Function: This feature is available on Tableau Server, Online and Desktop A new calculation type called MODEL_EXTENSION_X has been added to Tableau specifically to call deployed models from TabPy or other analytics extensions. It gives administrators a new configuration option to control TabPy deployments by disabling the execution of arbitrary Python code. Administrators can now maintain a single source of truth in the Analytics Extension server by leveraging a central version control, while end-users have an improved experience by easily accessing deployed functions on their TabPy server and understanding the model's requirements before adding it to the tool. Apart from the above Tableau 2022.1 has other exciting features the users can look forward to including:

• 1. Improvements in Esri Data Connector
• 2. Addition of new Accelerators
• 3. Added connectors to connect to more data sources

As with the earlier version, Tableau 2022.1 which has addressed a lot of the pain points experienced by its users. Certainly, it has a lot more to offer and enhancements to look forward to. Please download the new version and explore the new features. In case of any challenges while dealing with the new features or in case you need any help related to Tableau development, please reach out to the info@beinex.com. Would be more than happy to help you on the same!