Understand budget costs¶

Using budgets incurs the following costs:

Compute costs — Snowflake runs serverless background tasks (_MEASUREMENT_TASK and _BACKFILL_TASK) that collect credit usage data for the account budget and custom budgets in your account. The compute resources used for these tasks are billed to your account.
Storage costs — Snowflake stores metadata for Budgets in your account. Storage for this metadata is billed to your account.

Exploring compute costs¶

You can view costs for serverless tasks using Snowsight or the Account Usage SERVERLESS_TASK_HISTORY view.

Note

The _MEASUREMENT_TASK task runs when you add or remove object tags, which incurs cost for the serverless compute needed to run the task.

Example: Compute cost of all budgets

The following example sums the credit usage for the measure task for the previous 28 days, which helps you understand the total compute cost of using budgets:

SELECT SUM(credits_used)
   FROM snowflake.account_usage.serverless_task_history
   WHERE task_name = '_MEASUREMENT_TASK'
     AND start_time >= DATEADD('day', -28, current_timestamp());

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Example: Compute cost of individual budgets

The following example lists the budgets in the account along with the compute costs associated with each budget within the specified time period.

WITH costs AS (
  SELECT instance_id, SUM(credits_used) AS sum_credits
    FROM snowflake.account_usage.serverless_task_history
    WHERE start_time >= DATE_TRUNC('month',  CURRENT_TIMESTAMP())
      AND instance_id IS NOT NULL
   GROUP BY 1)
SELECT ci.name, ci.schema_name, ci.database_name, costs.sum_credits
FROM snowflake.account_usage.class_instances ci
  JOIN costs
    ON costs.instance_id = ci.id
WHERE class_name = 'BUDGET' AND class_database_name = 'SNOWFLAKE' AND deleted IS NULL;

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Exploring storage costs¶

The data and metadata needed for budgets is stored in the following internal tables:

_CONFIGURATION_TABLE
_MEASUREMENT_TABLE
_NOTIFICATION_TABLE
_BUDGET_HOT_USAGE_DATA
_BUDGET_COLD_USAGE_DATA

To determine costs associated with these tables, you can query the TABLES view in the Account Usage or Organization Usage schema to return the amount of storage being used for the tables.

The following examples returns the sum of the storage being used for the internal tables associated with budgets in the current account:

SELECT SUM(bytes)
   FROM snowflake.account_usage.tables
   WHERE table_name IN (
      '_CONFIGURATION_TABLE',
      '_MEASUREMENT_TABLE',
      '_NOTIFICATION_TABLE',
      '_BUDGET_HOT_USAGE_DATA',
      '_BUDGET_COLD_USAGE_DATA');

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