Financial Governance Overview¶
Approaching Snowflake cost using the financial governance 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.
In this Topic:
Financial Governance Framework¶
Effective Snowflake financial governance 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.
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