Top 10 AWS Reporting Tools: A Comprehensive Guide

Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed cloud-based business intelligence service that allows you to create, schedule, and share reports and data exports. It can connect with AWS data, third-party data, big data, spreadsheet data, SaaS data, and B2B data.

• • Pros: QuickSight offers user-management tools to scale from just a few users to tens of thousands.
  • Cons: Some users report that it may not be as flexible as other BI tools.
  • Use Case: Use QuickSight to get business-critical information to users how and when they need it.

Cost Explorer is one of the AWS tools for reporting and cost optimization. It provides detailed information about your AWS costs, allowing you to analyze past trends and forecast future costs.

• • Pros: It offers comprehensive data about your spending patterns.
  • Cons: The user interface can be complex for beginners.
  • Use Case: Use Cost Explorer to keep track of your AWS expenditure and optimize costs.

Trusted Advisor is an online resource that helps reduce cost, increase performance, and improve security by optimizing your AWS environment.

• • Pros: It provides real-time guidance to help provision your resources following AWS best practices.
  • Cons: Some checks are only available to customers of the Business and Enterprise support plan.
  • Use Case: Use Trusted Advisor to improve cloud security and compliance monitoring.

AWS Budgets allows you to set custom cost and usage budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount.

• • Pros: It allows you to effectively manage your AWS costs and usage.
  • Cons: It does not prevent services from being used once the budget is exceeded.
  • Use Case: Use AWS Budgets to control your AWS costs and prevent overspending.

CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers.

• • Pros: It collects monitoring and operational data through logs, metrics, and events.
  • Cons: Advanced features may require additional costs.
  • Use Case: Use CloudWatch to gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health.

CloudTrail enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account.

• • Pros: It provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command-line tools, and other AWS services.
  • Cons: Log storage can be costly over time.
  • Use Case: Use CloudTrail to track changes to your AWS resources.

The Amazon S3 Analytics tool analyzes storage access patterns and transitions the correct data to the proper storage class.

• • Pros: It provides storage analytics for better cost management.
  • Cons: It requires a good understanding of AWS storage classes.
  • Use Case: Use S3 Analytics to optimize storage costs.

Tableau is a powerful visualization and reporting tool that integrates well with Amazon Redshift.

• • Pros: It provides powerful visualization capabilities and is often considered by analysts for their BI tool needs.
  • Cons: It can be expensive for small businesses.
  • Use Case: Use Tableau for visualizing and interpreting large datasets.

Power BI is a business analytics tool suite that delivers insights throughout your organization.

• • Pros: It offers robust data modeling capabilities and integrates well with AWS Redshift.
  • Cons: The learning curve can be steep for non-technical users.
  • Use Case: Use Power BI to transform raw data into meaningful insights.

Looker is a data platform that makes it easy to find, explore, and understand the data that drives your business.

• Pros: Looker provides robust integration with AWS Redshift.
• Cons: It may require some SQL knowledge for complex data queries.
• Use Case: Use Looker to make data-driven decisions.