Your team is working on an IoT application. The data generated from the application is saved in S3 buckets and a Redshift data warehouse. You need to design interactive dashboards to analyze the data and share with other team members every day. With the dashboards, the team can explore the data further and get more insights. You have a limited budget on this assignment. Which of the below solutions is the most cost-effective?

Answer options:

A.Configure free third party tools such as Tableau. Design customized dashboards to help analyze the data using graphs, numbers and charts.
B.Generate CloudWatch metrics from the data in S3 and Redshift. Design CloudFormation templates to create CloudWatch dashboards to analyze the metrics.
C.Enable QuickSight in AWS. Use it to analyze the data, visualize the data and publish interactive dashboards that include machine learning insights.
D.Configure Kinesis Data Firehose and Data Analytics to collect the data and process the data in real-time. Generate personalized content in Kinesis Dashboards for analysis.

Correct Answer – C
There are two requirements in the question. One is creating interactive dashboards. The other one is being cost-effective. AWS QuickSight is an ideal service to achieve these two requirements. Check the introductions of QuickSight in https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/.
Option A is incorrect: Tableau is a powerful business intelligence (BI) tool and has more features. However, it is not a free tool and this solution is not cost-effective.
Option B is incorrect: Because CloudWatch metrics/dashboards cannot be used to generate data insights from S3 or Redshift.
Option C is CORRECT: QuickSight is a BI service which can generate rich and interactive dashboards. It also has a pay-per-session pricing and is a cost-effective solution.
Option D is incorrect: Because Kinesis cannot be used to create personal dashboards for data analysis. There is no service called Kinesis dashboards.