Elevating Data-Driven Decisions: An AWS and Looker Integration

Overview

Our client is a prominent fantasy sports platform, aimed to realize a centralized data repository for infrastructure and usage insights, enabling real-time, data-driven decisions across diverse teams. To achieve this vision, they partnered with ACC, seeking an innovative solution. ACC proposed an integrated approach utilizing AWS services and Looker, combining data from AWS Cost and Usage Reports, CloudWatch metric streams, AWS Glue ETL processes, and Amazon Redshift data warehousing. The outcome was a streamlined workflow culminating in interactive Looker dashboards. This collaboration underscores how ACC’s expertise and cutting-edge technologies can transform ambitious visions into tangible realities.

Opportunity

Our client faced significant hurdles in their journey. They needed a centralized solution to consolidate their AWS infrastructure and usage data, transcending the existing fragmented data distribution. Furthermore, they aspired to create real-time dashboards that could provide immediate access to critical insights. However, the complexity arose from the need to seamlessly distribute these dashboards across a diverse spectrum of teams, spanning executives, technology leaders, developers, and the infrastructure team. Moreover, the challenge of maintaining rapidly evolving resource-based tag information, which required a reliable mechanism for capturing regular updates, added another layer of intricacy to the task. This intricate interplay of requirements prompted our client to seek a solution that could harmonize these multifaceted challenges into a unified strategy.

Why ACC?

Our client chose to work with ACC because of our proven expertise in overcoming intricate challenges with comprehensive solutions. ACC’s proficiency in integrating intricate technologies like AWS and Looker closely matched our client’s needs for consolidating data and enabling real-time visualization. Furthermore, ACC’s capability to customize solutions to precise business requirements made them an optimal partner to address our client’s multifaceted demands effectively.

Solution | Architecture & Services

ACC’s solution for our client encompassed leveraging AWS services and Looker to tackle their challenges. Using AWS CUR and CloudWatch Metric Streams, data was collected and stored in Amazon S3. AWS Glue performed daily data transformations, which were then loaded into Amazon Redshift for efficient warehousing. Google’s Looker fetched data from Redshift, enabling real-time dashboards with valuable insights that were accessible to diverse teams. ACC’s proactive assistance included optimizing Glue pipelines and ensuring data accuracy, ultimately providing our client with a unified platform for centralized data and streamlined visualizations.

AWS Services Used

1. AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR): This service enabled the collection of detailed cost and usage data from various AWS resources, providing insights into resource consumption.
2. AWS Cost Explorer: Another potential service, Cost Explorer aids in understanding cost patterns and trends related to AWS resources, complementing CUR data.
3. AWS Glue: Employed for Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) operations, Glue processed and transformed data from CUR reports and CloudWatch metric streams, ensuring data readiness for analysis.
4. AWS Athena: Though not explicitly mentioned in the case study, Athena could have been potentially utilized to directly query and analyze data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL queries.
5. Amazon Redshift: As a powerful data warehousing solution, Redshift played a crucial role in storing the transformed data, optimizing it for querying and analysis.
6. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service): Served as a central storage repository for various data sources, including CUR reports and CloudWatch metric streams, facilitating data ingestion and accessibility.
7. Amazon CloudWatch: Used to capture real-time metrics and data from AWS resources, helping to monitor and analyze the performance and behavior of these resources.

Outcome

The collaboration between our client and ACC yielded remarkable results. ACC’s integrated solution, incorporating AWS services and Looker, successfully centralized data, generated realtime insights, and facilitated cross-team access. Through the streamlined integration of AWS Cost and Usage Reports, CloudWatch metric streams, AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, and Looker, ACC enabled the creation of dynamic dashboards that empowered informed decision-making across the organization. This case study exemplifies ACC’s ability to transform complex challenges into actionable solutions through cutting-edge technology integration