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QuickSight Dashboard Walkthrough

Step-by-step guide to exploring self-service analytics for council service metrics

Try Self-Service Analytics for Council Data

10 minutes to explore real-time council service metrics

No SQL required. Use Amazon QuickSight to filter, drill down, and export interactive dashboards showing waste collection, planning, housing, and customer service metrics.
Important Sandbox Note: This demo uses Chart.js with Lambda-generated data to demonstrate self-service analytics concepts without QuickSight licensing costs. In production, you would use Amazon QuickSight ($18/reader/month) with SPICE in-memory caching, Glue Data Catalog, and Athena for real-time SQL queries.
No technical knowledge required

This walkthrough guides you through exploring a pre-built analytics dashboard demonstrating self-service BI concepts. Perfect for data analysts, service managers, and anyone evaluating self-service business intelligence for answering operational questions without IT dependency.

What you'll do

In this 10-minute walkthrough, you'll:

  1. Access the QuickSight dashboard - Open the interactive dashboard via CloudFormation output URL (2 minutes)
  2. Explore service metrics overview - View KPI cards, charts, and tables showing council performance (3 minutes)
  3. Use interactive filters and drill-down - Apply date range, service type, and ward filters to explore data (3 minutes)
  4. Understand self-service analytics capability - Calculate ROI and see how officers can answer questions without IT (2 minutes)

Before you start

Important You must have already requested the QuickSight Dashboard scenario via NDX:Try.

Deploy the QuickSight Dashboard scenario if you haven't already. Deployment takes 8 to 12 minutes (QuickSight subscription setup + data import).

Sample data check

Ready Sample data is pre-loaded and ready to use.

What you'll learn

For data analysts

  • How QuickSight connects to S3/Athena data sources
  • Interactive filtering and drill-down capabilities
  • Exporting dashboards to PDF/Excel for committee reports
  • 80% reduction in ad-hoc report requests from officers
  • Real-time data access vs 7-day lag for manual reports

For service managers

  • Answering operational questions without IT involvement
  • Same-day data vs week-old Excel reports
  • Identifying trends and patterns across services
  • Committee reporting in 30 seconds vs 4 hours of analyst time
  • Data-driven decision making with evidence at your fingertips

Sample council service metrics

We've prepared realistic council service data for you to explore:

Dashboard visualizations

The QuickSight dashboard includes 12 interactive widgets across 5 visualization types:

KPI Cards

4 cards showing key metrics with trend indicators (completion rate, response time, satisfaction score)

Bar Charts

Service requests by month showing volume trends across all 5 council services

Pie Charts

Request types breakdown showing proportional distribution of service demand

Line Charts

Response time trends over 5 months showing improvement or deterioration

Data Tables

Detailed service performance tables with sortable columns for drill-down analysis

Questions officers can answer instantly (without IT)

Self-service analytics transforms how council officers work with data:

Current state (manual Excel reports)

  • Officer submits request: "How many waste collection requests last month?"
  • Wait 3-7 days for IT to create Excel report
  • Receive static report - no ability to explore or filter
  • New question? Submit another ticket, wait another week
  • Result: Decisions made on week-old data, limited exploration

With QuickSight self-service

  • Officer opens dashboard: 1 click, instant access
  • Apply filters: Last month, waste collection service
  • Read answer: 1,250 requests (2 seconds, not 7 days)
  • Follow-up question? Click drill-down, see by ward
  • Result: Real-time data, unlimited exploration, no IT dependency

Impact: Officers ask more questions when answers are instant. This data-driven culture leads to better service delivery, faster problem identification, and evidence-based decision making. IT time freed from repetitive report requests to focus on strategic transformation projects.

The wow moment

When you interact with the dashboard, you'll experience:

  • Instant filtering - Click a filter, see all 12 widgets update in milliseconds
  • Drill-down exploration - Click a bar chart, see underlying data rows
  • Export to PDF/Excel - Committee report generated in 30 seconds (vs 4 hours analyst time)
  • Multi-dimensional analysis - Slice data by service, ward, date simultaneously

This is powered by SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) - QuickSight's in-memory cache that queries millions of rows in milliseconds. Same responsiveness as Excel, but with cloud-scale data.

Think about your council's data analysts

How many hours per week do analysts spend creating Excel reports?

Consider the impact for a typical council data team:

Current analyst time
4 hours/week creating weekly Excel reports = 208 hours/year
With QuickSight self-service
1 hour/week maintaining dashboards = 52 hours/year
Analyst time saved
156 hours/year freed for strategic analysis
IT ad-hoc reports (current)
20 reports/month × 2 hours = 480 hours/year
IT ad-hoc reports (with self-service)
4 reports/month × 2 hours = 96 hours/year (80% reduction)
IT time saved
384 hours/year freed for strategic projects
Total annual benefit
£3,900 (analyst) + £13,440 (IT) = £17,340/year
QuickSight cost (10 users)
£2,218/year (Reader users + Athena + S3)
Net annual benefit
£15,122 (6.8:1 ROI, 1.5 month payback)

Committee language: "Amazon QuickSight self-service analytics reduces IT dependency by 80%, freeing 384 hours annually for strategic projects. Officers answer operational questions in real-time instead of waiting 7 days for reports. For 10 users, annual savings of £17,340 against £2,218 cost delivers 6.8:1 return on investment with payback in 1.5 months."

Start walkthrough

Takes approximately 10 minutes

Need help?

If you're stuck, check the troubleshooting section or contact us.