Monitoring Credit Usage with Budgets¶

Account Budget and Custom Budgets¶

To start using budgets in Snowflake, activate the account budget. The account budget monitors spending for all supported objects in the account. To get notifications for the budget, set up the spending limit and specify email addresses to receive notifications.

You can also create custom budgets to monitor the spending limits for a specific group of supported objects. You can create a custom budget in any database and schema. Like the account budget, you must set the spending limit and the notification email addresses in order to receive notification emails.

Spending Limit and Time Interval¶

The spending limit is expressed in Snowflake credits and is used for alerting and notifications purposes only. The spending limit is set for the time interval of one calendar month.

The time interval starts at 12:00AM UTC on the first day of the month and ends at 11:59PM UTC on the last day of the month. If a budget is created after the first day of the month, the first monitoring interval is the period until the last day of the current month, then is reset on the first of the following month.

If you activate your account budget after the first of the month, data starting from the beginning of the month is backfilled and used to determine if you are going to exceed your spending limit for the month.

If you create a custom budget after the first of the month, historical data for the month is not backfilled. Forecasting for future spend is based on the credit usage in the days only after the budget is enabled.

Supported Objects¶

The list of supported objects all contribute to the spending limit for the account budget. For a custom budget, you can select specific objects to monitor.

The following objects are supported for monitoring by a budget:

• Tables

• Materialized views

• Schemas

• Databases

• Warehouses

• Pipes

• Tasks

Notifications¶

A budget sends a daily alert notification when current spending is on track to exceed the spending limit based on time-series forecasting. To receive automatic alert notifications, you must:

• Set a spending limit for the budget.

• Set up email notifications for the budget.

The following is an example of a notification email:

Required Roles and Privileges to Create Budgets¶

You can use a custom role to create custom budgets in your account. The custom role must be granted:

• The SNOWFLAKE database role SNOWFLAKE.BUDGET_CREATOR.

• The CREATE SNOWFLAKE.CORE.BUDGET privilege on the schema in which to create the budget.

For example, create a budget_admin role and grant the required role and privileges to create custom budgets in schema budgets_db.budgets_schema:

CREATE ROLE budget_admin;

GRANT DATABASE ROLE SNOWFLAKE.BUDGET_CREATOR TO ROLE budget_admin;

GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA budgets_db.budgets_schema TO ROLE budget_admin;

GRANT CREATE SNOWFLAKE.CORE.BUDGET ON SCHEMA budgets_db.budgets_schema
  TO ROLE budget_admin;

Application Roles to Manage the Account Budget¶

You can grant the following application roles to a custom role in your account to modify or monitor the account budget.

GRANT APPLICATION ROLE SNOWFLAKE.BUDGET_ADMIN TO ROLE budget_admin;

GRANT APPLICATION ROLE SNOWFLAKE.BUDGET_VIEWER TO ROLE budget_monitor;

Instance Roles to Manage Custom Budgets¶

Each custom budget has instance roles that can be granted to other roles to view or modify the budget:

GRANT SNOWFLAKE.CORE.BUDGET ROLE budgets_db.budgets_schema.my_budget!ADMIN
  TO ROLE budget_admin;

Exploring Costs¶

You can view costs for serverless tasks using Snowsight or the Account Usage SERVERLESS_TASK_HISTORY View. For more information on viewing costs based on service type, see Exploring Compute Cost.

You can view costs for storage using Snowsight or by querying Account Usage and Organization Usage views. For more information on viewing storage costs, see Exploring Storage Cost.

Activate the Account Budget¶

Activate the account budget, set the spending limit for the account, and provide the email addresses to receive notifications when credit usage exceeds the spending limit.

You can activate the account budget by using Snowsight or SQL.

Create a Custom Budget Using Snowsight¶

1. Sign in to Snowsight.

2. Select Admin » Usage

3. Select Budgets.

4. In the upper-right corner of the dashboard, select (Add Budget).

   Note

   If you don’t see the Add Budget icon, you must first activate the account budget.

5. Enter a Budget name.

6. Select the database and schema in which to create your budget.

7. Enter the Spending limit.

8. Enter the email addresses to receive notifications.

   Note

   Each email address added for budget notifications must be verified. The notification email set up fails if any email address in the list is not verified.

9. Select Resources to monitor.

   • To add a database, expand Databases to select a database.

   • To add objects in a schema, expand the schema to list available objects. Expand the object category (for example, Tables or Tasks) to select objects.

   • To add a warehouse, expand Warehouses and select a warehouse.

   Note

   When you select a database or schema, all supported objects (for example, tables) contained within the database or schema are also added to the budget.

When you add email addresses for notifications using Snowsight, Snowflake creates or updates an email notification integration named deault_budget_notification_integration in a background process. If the notification integration exists, Snowflake adds any new email addresses you entered to the existing email addresses in the list.

If the notification integration does not exist, Snowflake creates it and grants the USAGE privilege. For details, see the steps outlined in account budget section.

Create a Custom Budget Using SQL¶

Create a custom budget and then set the spending limit and notification email addresses.

1. Review the existing budgets in your account:

   SELECT SYSTEM$SHOW_BUDGETS_IN_ACCOUNT();
   

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2. Create budget my_budget in budgets_db.budgets_schema using the CREATE SNOWFLAKE.CORE.BUDGET command:

   USE SCHEMA budgets_db.budgets_schema;
   
   CREATE SNOWFLAKE.CORE.BUDGET my_budget();
   

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3. Set the spending limit to 500 credits per month:

   CALL my_budget!SET_SPENDING_LIMIT(500);
   

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4. Set the notification integration and the email addresses:

   Note

   If you do have not already created an email NOTIFICATION INTEGRATION, see the steps in the account budget section to create one.

   CALL my_budget!SET_EMAIL_NOTIFICATIONS('budgets_notification_integration',
                                          'costadmin@example.com');
   

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5. To add objects to your custom budget, you must pass a reference to the budget’s ADD_RESOURCE method. For example, to add a table named t1 to the budget named my_budget:

   CALL budgets_db.budgets_schema.my_budget!ADD_RESOURCE(
      SYSTEM$REFERENCE('TABLE', 't1', 'SESSION', 'applybudget'));
   

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   The SYSTEM$REFERENCE statement creates a reference to a TABLE object, t1, with the APPLYBUDGET privilege granted on the table. The third parameter to the function specifies the scope for the reference, in this case ‘SESSION’ creates a reference with session scope. References passed to the ADD_RESOURCE method for a budget can be created with any transient reference scope (that is to say, the third parameter can be either ‘SESSION’ or ‘CALL’).

6. Grant the ADMIN instance role to your custom budget_admin role:

   GRANT SNOWFLAKE.CORE.BUDGET ROLE budgets_db.budgets_schema.my_budget!ADMIN
     TO ROLE budget_admin;
   

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You cannot activate the account budget¶

There are multiple reasons you might be unable to activate your account budget.

Unknown user-defined function SNOWFLAKE.LOCAL.ACTIVATE

FAILURE: Uncaught exception of type 'BUDGET_ALREADY_ACTIVATED'
on line X at position X

CALL SNOWFLAKE.LOCAL.ACCOUNT_ROOT_BUDGET!GET_CONFIG();

-20000 (P0001): Uncaught exception of type
'NO_PERMISSION_TO_ACTIVATE_BUDGET' on line X at position X

You cannot create a custom budget¶

There are multiple reasons you might be unable to create a custom budget.

FAILURE: SQL access control error:
Insufficient privileges to operate on class 'BUDGET'

FAILURE: Uncaught exception of type 'STATEMENT_ERROR' on line 0 at
position -1 : Uncaught exception of type 'UNSUPPORTED_BUDGET_TYPE' on
line X at position X

You cannot activate a custom budget¶

FAILURE: Uncaught exception of type 'STATEMENT_ERROR' on line 0 at
position -1 : Uncaught exception of type 'UNSUPPORTED_BUDGET_TYPE' on
line X at position X

You cannot call methods on the account budget¶

There are multiple reasons calling a method on the account budget might fail.

-20000 (P0001): Uncaught exception of type
'FUNCTION_NOT_SUPPORTED_FOR_ACCOUNT_ROOT_BUDGET' on line 11
at position 18

-20000 (P0001): Uncaught exception of type
'ACCOUNT_ROOT_BUDGET_NOT_ACTIVATED' on line X at position X

The budget feature is not available for your account¶

FAILURE: SQL compilation error:
Class 'SNOWFLAKE.CORE.BUDGET' does not exist or not authorized.

000002 (0A000): Uncaught exception of type 'STATEMENT_ERROR' on
line 0 at position -1 : Unsupported feature 'TOK_RESOURCE_GROUP'.