Simplify dashboard drill-down with the Amazon Quick Sight hierarchy filter

Amazon Quick Sight announced a hierarchy filter that lets dashboard authors replace multiple independent filter controls with one compact control supporting multi-level drill-down. The announcement was made on the AWS Machine Learning Blog.

The filter is described as organizing and presenting filter values in a hierarchical tree control. It supports up to five levels, with a drill path such as Region, Subregion, Country, City and Town. Levels do not have to be geographic; any parent-child dimensions work, such as Product Category and Product. Only dimension fields qualify as levels, including text, numeric dimensions, and Boolean fields. Measures such as Sales or Quantity are not offered.

Fields are arranged from broadest to most detailed and reordered one position at a time with move up and move down controls rather than drag-and-drop. The order defines the parent-to-child path, and reordering later clears selections already saved on the filter. Selecting a value at a lower level auto-selects its parent chain.

A worked example used a retail sales dataset covering three Regions (EMEA, AMER, APAC), eight countries, and fourteen cities, with a dashboard containing a KPI for Total Sales, Total Units, and Order Count, a filled map of Sales by Country, and a treemap of Sales by Region to Country to City. For the walkthrough, authors set Filter condition to Include, choose Null options, and set scope; the default is Only this visual, switchable to Cross-sheet (All sheets and visuals). The control is added from the filter options menu and can be pinned to the top of the sheet.

The top-level search bar searches only the highest hierarchy level; lower levels have their own search boxes, which appear when a level contains more than 10 unique values. If a level contains more than 1,000 unique values, only a search box appears with no values displayed. The Null options setting applies only to values shown in visuals and does not affect how null values appear in the hierarchy filter control itself. Author access to create and manage analyses and dashboards is required.