How to Migrate from Tableau to QuickSight: Step-by-Step Guide

What Makes the Tableau to QuickSight Migration Beneficial?

Migrating from Tableau to QuickSight is a move towards a serverless, cloud-native future. The key benefits of Tableau to the QuickSight migration are

• Serverless and Scalable Architecture: QuickSight’s serverless BI platform that automatically scales. It eliminates the need for capacity planning, upgrades, or performance tuning. Through this, they ensure consistent performance even when the data volume grows.
• Improved speed: Since QuickSight is cloud-native and fully managed, organizations focus on analytics. With their prebuilt data models, KPIs, and templates, QuickSight accelerates analytics implementation. This reduces the development cycles and enables faster rollout of dashboards.
• Enhanced Security and Compliance: QuickSight enforces governance through standard naming conventions and role-based access controls. Thereby, it improves data quality, compliance, and trust in analytics outputs. Row-level security and centralized governance policies ensure sensitive data is protected.
• Cost optimization: QuickSight employs a pay-per-session pricing model. It helps organizations to reduce licensing costs, infrastructure maintenance, and server management.
• AI-powered Insights: QuickSight creates a strong foundation for advanced analytics, automation, and AI-driven insights. It has built-in features to detect anomalies, make faster decisions, and foster innovations.

Challenges faced during the Tableau to QuickSight Migration and ways to overcome

Migrating from Tableau to QuickSight involves complex logic, data sources, and data modeling. Any migration comes with many challenges, and the ways to overcome them are

• Data connectivity: Tableau’s connections and extracts sometimes fail to map to their equivalent in QuickSight. This is causing refresh errors or data latency. QuickSight relies on AWS services for native integrations. To overcome this, check QuickSight’s compatibility and map all the data sources. Implement role-based and row-level security in QuickSight using centralized governance policies. Use SPICE for offline analytics to improve performance.
• Complex Logic: Business logic is often embedded with a Tableau dashboard. It requires manual rebuilding in QuickSight. To overcome this, recreate complex calculations using built-in functions or custom SQL queries.
• Security and Access Control: Mismatched row-level security and content permissions between Tableau and QuickSight can lead to access violations. To overcome this, document all existing security rules and validate them with stakeholders. Implement RLS in QuickSight using centralized governance policies.
• User Adoption: Business users may resist the change to QuickSight analytics as they may be accustomed to Tableau dashboards. To overcome this, start involving users early in demos and validation sessions. Offer hands-on training, documentation, and start phased rollout to build confidence and adoption.
• Validating the data: Any changes in reports can reduce user trust in QuickSight analytics. To mitigate this, perform data reconciliation and parallel validation during the migration. Check the performance and data consistency in the QuickSight analytics platform before decommissioning Tableau.

Best Practices for a Smooth Tableau to QuickSight Migration

1. Audit the Tableau environments and identify active dashboards and data sources. List unused assets before starting the QuickSight migration.
2. Prioritize business-critical reports and KPIs to ensure migration is done without any errors.
3. Start with pilot projects to demonstrate value and gradually transition to full implementation.
4. Standardize metrics early by mapping calculations to reusable KPIs within the QuickSight framework.
5. Centralize business logic in the QuickSight analytics layer to eliminate dashboard-level inconsistencies.
6. Using the built-in templates and accelerators of QuickSight reduces development time. This enforces consistency.
7. Implement security and governance controls in QuickSight to match Tableau permissions.
8. Validate the data by running both Tableau and QuickSight in parallel.
9. Provide user training and documentation to ensure smooth adoption.
10. Monitor the performance and refine dashboards based on usage and feedback.

7 Step Tableau to QuickSight Migration Process

Migrating from Tableau to Amazon QuickSight involves planning, content migration, and user reconfigurations. The key steps are discussed below.

1. Assessment of the Tableau environment:

Audit the existing Tableau environment. Generate a list of workbooks, calculated fields, extracts, dashboards, users, and data sources. Track the logs and prioritize them based on usage, complexity, and audit data connections.

2. Data Source and Architecture Alignment:

Check for compatibility of the data sources of Tableau with QuickSight. Establish direct connections between QuickSight and Tableau. Data models are redesigned or optimized to align with modern data platforms such as cloud data warehouses. This step established a clean, scalable, and reusable data architecture.

3. Business logic calculations:

Tableau-level calculations and filters are evaluated. They are translated into centralized logic within the QuickSight analytics layer. Use QuickSight’s built-in features or custom SQL to replicate complex logic. Separating the logic from individual dashboard archives improves consistency. It also improves performance and makes it easier to maintain.

4. Migrate content:

Download Tableau assets, recreate dashboards manually, and republish to QuickSight. Extract metadata, data, and recreate data models in QuickSight using relationships.

5. Visual Transformation:

Replicate the Tableau layout using QuickSight’s grid-based systems. Recreate charts utilizing QuickSight’s autograph features for similar visualizations.

6. Security and Access Control Implementation:

Map Tableau’s User/Row-Level Security (RLS) to QuickSight’s Dataset Rules. This ensures compliance with enterprise security policies and protects sensitive data.

7. Testing and validation:

Perform side-by-side comparisons of metrics, filters, and interactivity between Tableau and QuickSight. Recreate extracts and verify refresh schedules for data sources and workbooks. Do User Acceptance Testing (UAT) on certain users and validate the performance. Optimize SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) datasets for speeding up the load times.

Things to Be Considered Post Tableau to QuickSight Migration

A successful Tableau to QuickSight migration depends on how analytics is managed and optimized. Post-migration activities ensure long-term success and improve performance.

• Validate data accuracy: Do a parallel run and compare the reports and dashboards of both Tableau and QuickSight. Ensure Level-Aware Calculations (LAC) match Tableau’s LOD logic. Key metrics must be reviewed to ensure consistency. Define KPIs and alignment with enterprise data standards.
• User training: Provide hands-on training on helping users use QuickSight analytics. They should be able to create dashboards and use self-service analytics features effectively.
• Monitor and Optimize: Review the performance bottlenecks and optimize data sources. Data models should be periodically reviewed. It should be optimized to support new data sources, increased volumes, and advanced analytics use cases.
• Decommissioning Tableau: Decommission Tableau only after QuickSight is stable. Ensure to get user sign-off, and it does not disrupt business operations.

How can Entrans help with the Tableau to QuickSight Migration?

Tableau to QuickSight migration hits directly in decision-making, reporting, and accuracy. Choosing the right migration partner, like Entrans, will ensure the business logic is preserved. We ensure KPI are standardized, and long-term analytics goals are met.

With our proven expertise and experience, we meet with the governance validation frameworks. We follow best practices to ensure a smooth transition without compromising business continuity.

Learn about how we standardize BI workflows. Book a consultation call with us.