Managing Cost in Snowflake¶

Visibility¶

Visibility includes understanding the different sources of cost and the ability to explore that cost in detail. Visibility also includes attributing cost to the right entities within your organization and monitoring costs as they accumulate so you can avoid unexpected costs.

Understand

Gaining visibility into your Snowflake cost begins with understanding the basic concepts of Snowflake cost, including the different usage types that incur cost and the factors that determine the cost of using Snowflake resources. Learn More

Explore

Once you have a good understanding of how costs accumulate in Snowflake, you are ready to explore your current Snowflake costs. Snowsight, the Snowflake web interface, provides pre-built dashboards that help you visualize the cost of your Snowflake usage. If you would like to gather more details about your Snowflake cost, you can write custom queries against the Organization Usage and Account Usage schemas, which contain views dedicated to usage and cost. Learn More

Attribute

The ability to chargeback cost to different entities within your organization clarifies who is incurring costs and for what purpose. This visibility can inform decisions on how to implement cost-saving measures. Learn More

Monitor

When you have understood and attributed spend on Snowflake, you can implement a monitoring strategy that sends notifications when compute cost is approaching a spending limit. These monitoring features can automatically suspend compute resources, protecting you from overspending on compute resources. Learn More

Control¶

Snowflake helps you set guardrails and control costs so you never spend more than expected. For example, by setting limits on how long a query can run before it is terminated, you can avoid unexpected costs associated with runaway queries. Learn More

Optimization¶

Optimization begins with identifying areas where improvement can reduce costs.

You can use the following features to discover compute usage that might need fine-tuning.

Area	Description	Features	Snowflake Edition
Query Optimization	Get detailed information for query optimization	Query History Query Profile	All
Warehouse Optimization	Inspect warehouse load to optimize warehouse performance	Warehouse Load	All
Warehouse Optimization	Inspect warehouse events to identify room to optimize.	WAREHOUSE_EVENTS_HISTORY View	All

For a list of queries that help identify usage that might benefit from optimizations, see the Resource Optimization quickstart guides.

See also:

Understanding Overall Cost

The total cost of using Snowflake is the aggregate of the cost of using data transfer, storage, and compute resources.

Learn about how overall cost is calculated.

Exploring Overall Cost

Snowsight allows you to quickly and easily obtain information about cost from a visual dashboard. Queries against the usage views allow you to drill down into cost data and can help generate custom reports and dashboards.

Learn about exploring your spend using various queries to return cost information.

Monitoring Cost

Resource monitors allow you to monitor credit usage by user-managed virtual warehouses and the cloud services layer of the Snowflake architecture.

Learn about how to monitor your costs and spending in Snowflake.

Attributing Cost

Gain insight into Snowflake cost by attributing those costs to logical units within the organization such as departments, environments or other entities.

Learn how to attribute cost to differing entities within your organization.

Controlling Cost

Cost controls allow you to limit how much is spent on various services such as virtual warehouses.

Learn how to control costs by controlling access to warehouses, managing queries, enforcing spending limits and more.