User Lifecycle Management for QuickSight Readers

Question & Answer
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1

Hi All,

Given the new licensing changes for readers in QuickSight (flat rate of $3 per month per user) , managing inactive QuickSight readers is a key feature to help optimise costs.

Currently using QuickSight API’s combined with CUR / CUR V2 reports to map QuickSight events for Readers and the cost from CUR, to identify inactive readers (i.e. those who are not interactively viewing dashboards and pixel-perfect / paginated reports).

We have an established process to deprovision QuickSight accounts when someone leaves the organisation, so that is covered.

There’s a use case where where I can’t find the right data to help. Specifically, many dashboards and pixel-perfect reports are emailed to users. Reviewing the email is sufficient for them and they may not log into QuickSight to interact with the dashboard/pixel-perfect report.

This would be a false positive for an inactive reader - as there’s nothing to indicate they receive emailed dashboards or pixel-perfect reports.

What would really help here is:

  • ability to describe the email schedule and the recipients of a dashboard/pixel-perfect report
  • ability to describe a user and the dashboards/pixel-perfect reports they subscribe to
  • ability to describe/query an audit of emails sent with recipients

I’ve looked around at a lot of QuickSight documentation and used Amazon Q Developer, but it seems the above data (or some variation of it) is not exposed by the current API’s / logs etc.

Does anyone else have this problem ?.

2

Hello @gavclark

My assumption is that if you remove the QuickSight user when that person leaves your org, that the QuickSight email subscriptions would stop for their email as well.

Is the worry here for users that are no long active in your org or just users that are not opening the emails that are sent to them? Have you seen deprecated users’ emails still receiving the dashboard and pixel perfect emails?

3

Hi @duncan ,

On your first point I would assume the same. When a user leaves the organisation we have a process in place to deprovision the QuickSight account.

On your second point, I would like to know if emails are being sent to the user - in my use case I would consider them an active user (regardless of whether they open the email or not).

The challenge is that I can’t find any API’s or logs that show that emails are being sent to a specific user or group.

Hope that clarifies

thanks
Gavin

4

Hey @gavclark

From my research there is no specific API for listing users and groups that are receiving emails. You can list users that have dashboard permissions which is a sort of workaround.

I can mark this as a feature request for more robust APIs for schedules and pixel perfect reporting recipients.

5

Hi @duncan ,

Thanks - it confirms my investigation. Feature request would be great.

Great idea about the dashboard access - I will see how we can factor that in.

thanks
Gavin Clark

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