A city finance office must publish interactive dashboards so council members can explore budget spending by department without exporting spreadsheets. Which AWS service should the office use?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Think of QuickSight like a living slide deck for numbers — drag filters, watch charts update, and stop emailing static Excel dumps to council. Athena can dig through files in S3, but it is not the BI dashboard tool; CloudWatch and Cost Explorer answer ops or AWS-bill questions, not city budget stories.
Full Explanation
A city finance office that must publish interactive dashboards so council members can explore budget spending by department—without exporting static spreadsheets—should use Amazon QuickSight. QuickSight is AWS's business intelligence service for creating visualizations and interactive dashboards from approved datasets. Council members can filter by department, period, or fund and see charts update live, which is the civic storytelling layer finance teams need beyond raw query results or ops metrics.
Amazon Athena queries files in S3 with SQL but does not itself provide the BI visualization dashboard experience the stem asks for—though Athena results may feed analytics pipelines that QuickSight later visualizes. Amazon CloudWatch dashboards focus on operational metrics such as EC2 CPU and service health, not departmental budget exploration for council. AWS Cost Explorer charts AWS account charges, not the city's own budget-of-record spending stories across municipal departments. Each distractor is useful in its lane but fails the interactive civic BI requirement.
Exam caveat: Match the audience and artifact. Council budget exploration → QuickSight. AWS bill exploration → Cost Explorer. Infrastructure metrics → CloudWatch. SQL on S3 → Athena. Do not conflate "dashboard" across those products.
Operational check for finance: connect QuickSight to governed datasets (for example Athena/Redshift/S3 with clear ownership), apply row-level or folder permissions so departments see appropriate slices, publish dashboards to council distribution groups, train members on filters, refresh SPICE or direct queries on a schedule aligned to monthly closes, and watermark or document data freshness so policy debates do not rely on stale extracts.