Exploring overall cost

You can explore historical cost using Snowsight, or by writing queries against views in the ACCOUNT_USAGE and ORGANIZATION_USAGE schemas. 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.

If you need an introduction to how costs are incurred in Snowflake, refer to Understanding overall cost.

To obtain a billing statement that contains information about historical usage, see View billing statements in Snowsight.

Granting access to cost and usage data

By default, only account administrators (that is, users with the ACCOUNTADMIN role) have access to cost and usage data. Some features related to viewing costs require the account administrator to also have the ORGADMIN role.

An administrator with the USERADMIN role or higher can use SNOWFLAKE database roles to grant other users access to cost and usage data. You can use the following SNOWFLAKE database roles to provide access:

  • USAGE_VIEWER — Required to view cost information in Snowsight. Also provides access to cost and usage views in the ACCOUNT_USAGE schema.

  • GOVERNANCE_VIEWER — Required to view cost information in Snowsight. Also provides access to governance-related views in the ACCOUNT_USAGE schema.

  • ORGANIZATION_BILLING_VIEWER — Can be used in conjunction with the USAGE_VIEWER and GOVERNANCE_VIEWER roles to expand a user’s access in Snowsight to include viewing costs in currency, not just credits, and seeing the price of a credit. Also provides access to views in the ORGANIZATION_USAGE schema that contain cost and usage information for the entire organization.

To learn how to use SNOWFLAKE database roles to provide access to a user, refer to Using SNOWFLAKE Database Roles.

Viewing costs using Snowsight

Snowsight provides multiple pages that allow you to explore the historical cost of using Snowflake. For details on using these pages to view overall costs, see:

Overview of incurred costs

The Account Overview page provides high-level insights into the cost of using Snowflake and can be a starting off point for optimizing your spend.

Note

Account administrators cannot see the price of a credit or usage costs in currency unless they also have the ORGADMIN role.

To access an overview of incurred costs:

  1. Sign in to Snowsight.

  2. Switch to the ACCOUNTADMIN role. If you are not the account administrator, switch to a role with access to cost and usage data.

  3. Select Admin » Cost Management.

  4. Select a warehouse to use to view the usage data. Snowflake recommends using an X-Small warehouse for this purpose.

  5. Select Account Overview.

Many tiles on the Account Overview page have a View All option to expand the contents of the tile to include more items. For example, for the Top warehouses by cost tile, select View All to open a dialog that displays all warehouses in your account sorted by cost.

To display the SQL query used to populate a tile, select View All » View query (View query button.) . For example, if you view the query for the Top warehouses by cost tile, you see that the data comes from querying the WAREHOUSE_METERING_HISTORY view in the ACCOUNT_USAGE schema of the shared SNOWFLAKE database.

Note

Customers who signed a contract through a Snowflake reseller cannot see the price of a credit or usage in a currency.

Drilling down into incurred costs

You can use the Consumption page to drill down into the overall cost of using Snowflake for any given day, week, or month.

Note

To access all of the features on the Consumption page, the account administrator must also have the ORGADMIN role.

To use Snowsight to drill down into the overall cost:

  1. Sign in to Snowsight.

  2. Switch to the ACCOUNTADMIN role. If you are not the account administrator, switch to a role with access to cost and usage data.

  3. Select Admin » Cost Management.

  4. Select a warehouse to use to view the usage data. Snowflake recommends using an X-Small warehouse for this purpose.

  5. Select Consumption.

  6. Select All Usage Types from the drop-down list.

This totals the cost of compute, storage, and data transfer resources and displays them in a bar graph using the organization’s currency. The total cost of these resources during the selected time period appears above the bar graph.

To isolate the cost of compute, storage, or data transfer, adjust your selection in the All Usage Types filter.

Note

If the usage details fail to load with a message indicating that The result set is too large to display, you must use the filters to select a shorter date range or otherwise filter the results.

Querying data for overall cost

Snowflake provides two schemas, ORGANIZATION_USAGE and ACCOUNT_USAGE, that contain data related to usage and cost. The ORGANIZATION_USAGE schema provides cost information for all of the accounts in the organization while the ACCOUNT_USAGE schema provides similar information for a single account. Views in these schemas provide granular, analytics-ready usage data to build custom reports or dashboards.

The following query combines data from the USAGE_IN_CURRENCY view in the ORGANIZATION_USAGE schema in order to gain insight into the overall cost of using Snowflake.

Query: Total usage costs in dollars for the organization, broken down by account
SELECT account_name,
  ROUND(SUM(usage_in_currency), 2) as usage_in_currency
FROM snowflake.organization_usage.usage_in_currency_daily
WHERE usage_date > DATEADD(month,-1,CURRENT_TIMESTAMP())
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 2 desc;
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View billing statements in Snowsight

You can view and download billing usage statements in Snowsight, starting with July 2023 statements.

You must have the ACCOUNTADMIN and ORGADMIN roles, and be in an account that has the ORGADMIN role enabled. Customers who signed a contract through a Snowflake reseller cannot view or download usage statements.

Note

Customers in US SnowGov Regions on AWS GovCloud and Microsoft Azure Government cannot view their billing statements in Snowsight.

  1. Sign in to Snowsight.

  2. Select Admin » Billing & Terms, and then select Billing Documents.

The retention period for statements is 1 year. However, a statement contains historical usage for all months of the current contract. This lets you obtain information about historical costs older than one year if the contract is a multi-year contract. For example, if a 3-year contract started in July 2021, the July 2024 statement contains usage from 2021.

To get usage statements older than 1 year, send a request to accounts.receivable@snowflake.com.

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