Controlling cost¶

Use budgets to control credit usage¶

A budget allows you to set a monthly spending limit and monitor the credit usage of all supported objects and serverless features in your account. In addition to your account budget, you can create custom budgets to monitor credit usage of groups of specified objects and the serverless features used by those objects. For example, you can create a custom budget for each department in your organization. Each budget sends a notification if the credit usage is expected to exceed its spending limit for the month. You can configure the budget to send this notification to a list of email addresses, a queue provided by a cloud service (Amazon SNS, Azure Event Grid, or Google Cloud PubSub), or a webhook for a third-party system (for example, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or PagerDuty).

For information about budgets, see Monitor credit usage with budgets.

Use resource monitors to control credit usage¶

A resource monitor allows you to monitor credit usage by user-managed virtual warehouses and the cloud services layer of the Snowflake architecture. You can set a spending limit that resets on a monthly basis or on a custom schedule. A resource monitor can send an email notification when your credit usage reaches a percentage (threshold) of the spending limit. You can customize up to five notification thresholds. To help avoid unexpected credit usage, you can optionally suspend a warehouse when its credit usage reaches a threshold.

For background information about how virtual warehouses and cloud services incur costs, see Understanding compute cost.

For information about resource monitors, see Working with resource monitors.

Cost controls for warehouses¶

For a set of best practices that act as cost controls for virtual warehouses, see Cost controls for warehouses.