Setting up a basic dashboard

For initial visualization, there are several options within AWS. One good option for a long-term Business Intelligence (BI) service is AWS QuickSight. QuickSight allows you to connect to your data and includes in-memory data storage for quick data analysis or to provide customized dashboards and reports. No proper BI tool (AWS or otherwise) is ready out of the box for end users. Transforming and loading data sources and end-user training to make good use of the data and build valuable visualizations is an effort.

We will explore AWS QuickSight in a later chapter, so for our initial setup, we will build a simple dashboard to show the incoming data and to get a feel for how the information looks. We will do this by starting simple and then combining data in ways that make sense—energy versus flow, or machine parameters that can be compared against quality, can be a valid combination of measurements. Figure 4.12 shows a simple AWS Grafana dashboard...