Managing Cost in Snowflake¶
Approaching Snowflake cost using the cost management framework described in this topic allows you to manage costs more effectively. Each part of the framework offers powerful features that help minimize total cost of ownership while maximizing the economic value that Snowflake provides.
Cost Management Framework¶
Effective Snowflake cost management is divided into three parts: visibility, control, and optimization.
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 |
All |
|
Warehouse Optimization |
Inspect warehouse load to optimize warehouse performance |
All |
|
Warehouse Optimization |
Inspect warehouse events to identify room to optimize. |
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
Budgets allow you to monitor the credit usage of supported objects in your account. 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.