A Quick Guide to Understand and Control your Snowflake Spending with Cost Management Feature
Effective cost management is crucial for any organization using cloud data platforms like Snowflake. With the new Cost Management features available in Snowsight, Snowflake’s user interface, managing and understanding your Snowflake expenditure has become more intuitive and comprehensive. This blog post will guide you through utilizing Snowflake Cost Management to gain valuable insights into your Snowflake usage costs from Organizational level to specific Account level details
Step #1: Gain Organization Usage Overview
The Cost Management Organization Overview Interface in Snowsight provides an organization usage overview, which includes:
- Contract Details: View specifics about your current contract, including the remaining balance.
- Accumulated Costs: Track the total cost of Snowflake usage since the start of your contract.
- Monthly Spend: Monitor the monthly expenditure for your organization.
- Account Consumption Overview: Get a detailed view of each account’s spending within your organization.
Step #2: Gain Granular Visibility into Account Usage and Spend
The Cost Management Account Overivew Interface in Snowsight provides an in-depth look at account-level consumption and spend. It includes:
- Dollars and Credits Spent: Track the financial and credit expenditure over a specified period.
- Average Daily Spend: Monitor daily spending trends.
- Top Warehouses by Cost: Identify which warehouses incur the highest costs.
- Most Expensive Queries: Analyze costly queries to optimize performance and cost.
You can delve deeper into any metric, view detailed object usage, and examine the underlying SQL scripts generating these insights. This transparency allows customization of the SQL scripts for personalized dashboards.
Step #3: Configure Controls to Avoid Surprises
Snowflake introduces Budgets and Resource Monitors within the Cost Management Interface, allowing admins to control Snowflake spending from a single location.
Setting Up Budgets:
Budgets enable setting spend controls at various levels for a fixed calendar month, resetting on the first day of each month. Here’s how to set up an account-level Budget:
- Go to Admin > Cost Management > Budgets in Snowsight.
- Fill out a target spending limit based on your current and projected usage.
- Provide an email address for budget violation notifications.
Once set, the Budget feature extrapolates daily spend limits, notifying you immediately of any violations. A graph displays the extrapolated spend limit trend line (black dotted line), actual observed spend (blue bars), and forecasted spend (gray bars). Admins can also create custom Budgets by grouping compute resources within an account, corresponding to specific departments, functions, business units, or workloads. This allows for more granular monitoring and proactive alerting.
Final Thoughts
The Cost Management Interface not only provides visibility and control but also offers optimization insights. Cost Insights in the Account Overview will also suggest valuable actions to reduce unintended costs, prioritizing the most impactful savings. Snowflake’s enhanced Cost Management features in Snowsight provide organizations with the tools to gain comprehensive insights into their Snowflake costs, control spending, and optimize usage.
By leveraging the Organization Overview page, granular visibility into account usage, Budgets, and Cost Insights, admins can effectively manage and optimize Snowflake expenditures, ensuring a cost-efficient cloud data platform experience.