Managing Snowflake alerts with Python

You can use Python to manage Snowflake alerts, which you can set up to periodically perform an action under specific conditions, based on data within Snowflake. For more information about alerts, see Setting up alerts based on data in Snowflake.

Note

ALTER ALERT is currently not supported.

The Snowflake Python APIs represents alerts with two separate types:

  • Alert: Exposes an alert’s properties such as its name, condition, action, and schedule.

  • AlertResource: Exposes methods you can use to fetch a corresponding Alert object, execute the alert, and drop the alert.

Prerequisites

The examples in this topic assume that you’ve added code to connect with Snowflake and to create a Root object from which to use the Snowflake Python APIs.

For example, the following code uses connection parameters defined in a configuration file to create a connection to Snowflake:

from snowflake.core import Root
from snowflake.snowpark import Session

session = Session.builder.config("connection_name", "myconnection").create()
root = Root(session)
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Using the resulting Session object, the code creates a Root object to use the API’s types and methods. For more information, see Connect to Snowflake with the Snowflake Python APIs.

Creating an alert

To create an alert, first create an Alert object, and then create an AlertCollection object from the API Root object. Using AlertCollection.create, add the new alert to Snowflake.

Code in the following example creates an Alert object that represents an alert named my_alert in your account:

from snowflake.core.alert import Alert, MinutesSchedule

root.alerts.create(Alert(
    name="my_alert",
    condition="SELECT 1",
    action="SELECT 2",
    schedule=MinutesSchedule(minutes=1),
    comment="test comment"
))
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The code creates an AlertCollection variable alerts and uses AlertCollection.create to create a new alert in Snowflake.

Getting alert details

You can get information about an alert by calling the AlertResource.fetch method, which returns an Alert object.

Code in the following example gets information about an alert named my_alert:

my_alert = root.alerts["my_alert"].fetch()
print(my_alert.to_dict())
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Listing alerts

You can list alerts using the AlertCollection.iter method, which returns a PagedIter iterator of Alert objects.

Code in the following example lists alerts whose name starts with my, and then prints the name of each. This example also sets the optional parameter show_limit=5 to limit the number of results to 5:

alerts_iter = root.alerts.iter(like="my%", show_limit=5)
for alert_obj in alerts_iter:
  print(alert_obj.name)
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Performing alert operations

You can perform common alert operations, such as executing and dropping alerts, with an AlertResource object.

To demonstrate some operations you can do with an alert resource, code in the following example does the following:

  1. Gets the my_alert alert resource object.

  2. Executes the alert.

  3. Drops the alert.

my_alert_res = root.alerts["my_alert"]

my_alert_res.execute()
my_alert_res.drop()
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