Identify easy ways to save with Snowflake cost insights

Customers are always looking for ways to save money without compromising performance. With a platform as large-scale as Snowflake, finding these opportunities can be challenging. Snowflake admins often have thousands of tables and warehouses to manage, so finding optimization opportunities can feel overwhelming. The best cost optimizations avoid performance tradeoffs and simply reduce wasteful spending. For example, removing tables which are never used reduces cost with no negative tradeoff.

We are excited to announce that you can use cost insights, now GA, to identify these types of cost savings opportunities. Snowflake continuously analyzes customer usage and surfaces cost insights through the new Cost Management Interface. By reviewing your account’s cost insights, you can identify easy ways to save Snowflake costs.

In developing the initial set of cost insights, we focused on the following guiding principles:

1. The insight should help you identify meaningful cost savings.
2. The insight should be easy for you to validate and act on
3. Acting on the insight should save you money with no performance trade-off.

If you don’t have any cost insights identified for your Snowflake account, we’ll indicate the cost insights for which we have checked, as well as the last time we checked for cost insights:

Pictured above: This Snowflake account only has one cost insight, which flagged unused materialized views. There were not any objects identified by the remaining cost insights.

At GA, we’re excited to launch 6 total cost insights:

Insight 1 : Rarely used tables with automatic clustering

This insight identifies tables with Automatic Clustering that are queried fewer than 100 times per week by this account.

Insight 2 : Rarely used materialized views (MVs)

This insight identifies materialized views that are queried fewer than 10 times per week by this account.

Insight 3: Rarely used search optimization paths

This insight identifies Search Optimization access paths that are used fewer than 10 times per week by this account.

Insight 4: Large tables that are never queried

This insight identifies large tables that have not been queried in the last week by this account.

Insight 5: Tables over 100GB from which data is written but not read

This insight identifies tables where data is only written but never read by this account.

Insight 6: Short-lived permanent tables

This insight identifies tables over 100 GB which were deleted within 24 hours of their creation.

Cost insights are available to all Snowflake accounts automatically and for no additional cost. Snowflake checks for new cost insights once per week and anyone with the ACCOUNTADMIN role can view the cost insights. We will add to this list of insight over time, including insights on how to optimize your warehouses.

Getting started:

To access cost insights:

1. Sign in to Snowsight.
2. Switch to the ACCOUNTADMIN role.
3. In the navigation menu, select Admin » Cost Management.
4. Select the Account Overview tab.
5. Find the Cost Insights tile.

You can learn more here. We’re excited that it’s easier than ever to optimize your Snowflake bill!