Business Intelligence - Frequently Asked Questions
See below for often-asked questions and solutions, by subject.
Running and Updating the CloudFormation
Deploying our Managed Reports (Dashboards) into your QuickSight Account
Question: No reports discovered, on the QuickSight Reports Deployment view
The most common reason this occurs is when the Symbee Connect Administration Portal can't gain access to the scbi-managed-xxxx Shared Folder within QuickSight, for the AWS Region you have configured for your Environment.
When you visit the QuickSight Reports Deployment view in the Administration Portal and click Discover Available Reports, first it pulls the list of known available reports, and then it checks your scbi-managed Shared Folder in QuickSight to discover what you have already installed, what's not installed, and what has more recent updates. If no access to your QuickSight Account in the required region can be gained, or if the Shared Folder is not present, no reports will be listed on the Reports Deployment view.
Common root causes, and things to check:
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Confirm you have already successfully run the Business Intelligence CloudFormation, and you used a YAML file downloaded from the Feature Integrations (CloudFormations) page of the exact Symbee Connect Environment you are using.
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Try downloading the latest Business Intelligence CloudFormation for your environment and performing an Update on your deployed CloudFormation stack using the latest downloaded template (YAML file). This will ensure you are running the latest version.
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Check the QuickSight AWS Region setting (within the Symbee Connect Integration view, under the Business Intelligence section in the Admin Portal) matches the AWS Region you ran the BI CloudFormation stack for this same Symbee Connect Environment. Also make sure you are not re-using a downloaded BI CloudFormation YAML from a different environment - the downloaded YAML is preconfigured with the details of the Environment it is downloaded from.
- Log into your QuickSight console, make sure you are in the same AWS Region as above (see the Region Selector in the dropdown menu at the top-right of the QuickSight console), and navigate to Shared Folders. Confirm that you see the scbi-managed as a top-level Shared Folder. If you don't see this, confirm your CloudFormation completed okay, and also confirm you have added yourself (as a QuickSight user) to either the scbi-admins-xxxx or scbi-viewers-xxxx User Group within QuickSight.
Question: Reports fail to deploy, from the QuickSight Reports Deployment view
The most common reason for this is if your QuickSight Account has either not been granted access to the required Business Intelligence S3 Buckets that were created by the CloudFormation, or the scbi-athena-xxxx QuickSight DataSource (also created by the CloudFormation) ended up in a Creation Failed state during or after deployment.
Things to verify (log into your QuickSight console for both of these):
- In QuickSight as an Administrator, navigate to Manage QuickSight (top right), and click into Security and Permissions on the left:
- In the top QuickSight access to AWS services section, click Manage
- In the detail screen, make sure Amazon S3 is checked, and click the Select S3 buckets link
- In the Select Amazon S3 buckets dialog, locate the BI data bucket (it will be named named sc-bi-data...) and make sure it is checked (you don't need Write permissions on this bucket, read only is fine)
- In the Select Amazon S3 buckets dialog, locate the BI Athena Results bucket (it will be named named sc-bi-athena-rslts...) and make sure it is checked and has Write Permissions checked (you need write permissions on this bucket)
- Still in Manage QuickSight, click into Manage Groups In QuickSight, make sure your user is added to the scbi-admins User Group (to make sure you have visibility for the next step)
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This step ensures your DataSource is in an active state. You will not really create a new DataSet here, but you need to enter the New Dataset screen to get visibility into your DataSource. Return to the home screen in QuickSight, then:
- Click on Datasets on the left
- Click the New Dataset button, top right
- On the Create a Dataset page, scroll to the bottom, and under the From Existing Data Sources section, find the DataSource named scbi-athena-xxxx and click on it
- In the resulting dialog, click on Edit Data Source
- In the resulting dialog, at the bottom, click the Validate Connection button, and make sure it comes back as Validated with a green tick
- Then click Update Data Source (which forces the Connect). Then on the resulting dialog, just cancel using the 'x' in the top right
After completing the above steps, return to the QuickSight Reports Deployment view in your Symbee Connect Administration Portal, and re-attempt to deploy the required reports/dashboards.