Getting Started with Amazon QuickSight

Access to the ServiceTrade Data Warehouse with Amazon QuickSight is available only to ServiceTrade Enterprise customers.  For more information about ServiceTrade Enterprise, contact sales@servicetrade.com.

Amazon QuickSight is a low-cost, high-performance business intelligence and reporting tool.  By leveraging ServiceTrade's integration with QuickSight, managers, owners, and business analysts can gain insights into customer service data.

Important - please read first:

• Access to your Data Warehouse for use with Amazon QuickSight is available only to Enterprise customers. More information about ServiceTrade Enterprise is available here.
• Amazon QuickSight is a cloud application and tool separate from your ServiceTrade account. You will need first to sign up for an Amazon QuickSight account and log into it before being able to move your ServiceTrade data into it.
• Contact ServiceTrade support at support@servicetrade.com to receive your ServiceTrade Data Warehouse username/schema and password. This information is specifically for connecting ServiceTrade to QuickSight after you have logged in to the application and is not your account name or password to log into Amazon's QuickSight services.

Step 1: Connecting to Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight is a cloud application and tool separate from your ServiceTrade account. You will need first to sign up for an Amazon QuickSight account and log into it before being able to move your ServiceTrade data into it.

1. Open https://aws.amazon.com/ in your browser.
2. Select the Sign in to the Console button in the top right corner.
   
3. Select Create a new AWS account
   
4. Enter the administrator account email address and a AWS account name.
   • Example: ServiceTrade's AWS account name is 'servicetrade'
5. When done click select Verify email address
   
6. Amazon will email you a verification code from no-reply@signup.aws.com for the next step
   
7. Enter the Code in the Verification code field and select Verify
8. Set the password for the account, remember to save it securely.
   
9. Enter your business information in the next screen.
   
   
10. Enter your payment information
    
11. Amazon will send you a code or call you to confirm your identity.

12. On the Select a support Plan screen, choose the Basic support - Free plan option.
    
    
13. Click Complete sign up.
14. Then sign in to your AWS account.

Step 2: Subscribing to QuickSight

1. Login to your AWS Account.
2. Open the Services Directory in the top left corner of the screen.
   
3. Select Analytics.
   
4. From the AWS Management Console, click QuickSight.
   • You can find it under the Analytics Menu or by searching 'QuickSight'
     
     
5. Choose Sign up for QuickSight.
   
   
6. Choose Enterprise. The one without 'Q'.
   
7. In the Authentication method section, select Use IAM federated identies & Quicksight Managed Users.
   
8. For QuickSight region select US East (N. Virginia)
   
9. Enter a unique account name for QuickSight.
   • Your account name can only contain characters (A–Z and a–z), digits (0–9), and hyphens (-).

10. Enter a notification email address for the QuickSight account owner or group. This email address receives service and usage notifications.
    
11. Select Finish.

Step 3: Connecting to the Data Warehouse

Your ServiceTrade data is available to QuickSight through an Amazon Redshift data warehouse.  To use QuickSight to create reports and visualizations from your ServiceTrade data, you must connect your QuickSight account to your data warehouse.

The initial connection process will connect QuickSight to your data warehouse and allow you to access any ServiceTrade data warehouses going forward.

1. Log into Amazon QuickSight
2. Click ‘Manage Data’
3. Click ‘New Data Set’
4. Click ‘Redshift (manual connect)’
5. Enter the following:
   

   Field	Enter the following
   Data source name	ServiceTrade Data Warehouse
   Database server	redshift-1.servicetrade.com
   Port	5439
   Database name	main
   Username (schema)	<your assigned data warehouse username>
   Password	<your assigned data warehouse password>

6. Click ‘Validate Connection’ to confirm connection parameters
7. Click ‘Create data source’
8. Choose the schema that you were assigned
9. Choose the data source table that you want to visualize, such as ‘jobs’.  (You can create additional data sources for other tables later)
10. Click ‘Directly query your data’
11. Click ‘Edit/Preview data’
12. *optional If desired, change the name of the data source.
13. Click ‘Save’

Adding More Data Source Tables

1. Log into Amazon QuickSight
2. Click ‘Manage Data’
3. Click ‘New Data Set’
4. In ‘Existing data sources’, click the data source you created when originally setting up QuickSight (such as 'ServiceTrade Data Warehouse')
5. Click ‘Create data set’
6. Choose the schema that you were assigned
7. Choose the data source table that you want to visualize
8. Click ‘Directly query your data’
9. Click ‘Edit/Preview data’
10. *optional If desired, change the name of the data source
11. Then click ‘Save’

Repeat this process for each additional data source table that you want to visualize.

Refreshing a data source table

ServiceTrade may periodically add new columns to your data warehouse tables.  To gain access to those new columns, you will need to refresh your data source table.

1. Log into QuickSight
2. Click ‘Manage Data’
3. Click the data set to be refreshed
4. Click ‘Edit data set’
5. Confirm that the new columns are available in the list of fields on the left
6. Click ‘Save’

Note:  It is NOT necessary to refresh your data source tables to get updated data (new jobs, invoices, etc) from ServiceTrade -- that data will be updated automatically on a set schedule.  Manually refreshing a data source table is only needed to gain access to new columns of data in your data warehouse.

Please review this article for more information about the specific fields included in each data warehouse dataset.

Alternate BI Tools

You may choose to visualize your data with a business intelligence tool other than Amazon QuickSight (such as Domo or Power BI).  If so, your BI tool will need to support PostgreSQL connections.  The instructions above should provide enough information for you to configure your BI tool.  Please note the following:

• ServiceTrade provides support only for Amazon QuickSight.  Other BI tools are not officially supported.
• You will need to provide ServiceTrade with a static IP address from which your BI tool will connect to your ServiceTrade data warehouse.