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One of the biggest difference of Snowflake from the other types of cloud-based data warehousing is that Snowflake offers a pricing control, which allows companies to manage their usage and costs effectively. You can check your usage history in a very detailed way and adjust the limitation of usage in specific areas to be able to manage your Snowflake account better.

Important Note: only ACCOUNT ADMIN role can see the usage detail of the account.

How to check your usage history in Snowflake

There are several options to make this control, the first one and the simplest one is

to check it from snowsıght
  1. Log in to your Snowflake account and navigate to the “Admin” tab:
How To Check Your Usage History in Snowflake
admin part inside Snowsight
  1. 2. Click on the Usage tab:
How To Check Your Usage History in Snowflake
usage part inside Admin

3. Here, you can view your usage history, you can filter the time that you want to see for the specific period; for day, for months…:

filtering the period of usage
filtering the period of usage

4. You can filter your usage history by specific resources, such as storage or compute, to get a more detailed view of your usage:

usage type options
usage type options

Example of monitoring the compute usage of last 28 days:

compute usage
compute usage

As you can see in compute usage option, Snowflake shows us the usage in the base of credits. This type is always going to be in credits when you want to see the usage for specific type; for the total usage display it uses a currency.

In the bottom right corner (when we choose a usage type) it displays us even the details of used credit. We can see from here in which operation we lost the most value and so on.

Reminder: it is important to remember that the usage in Snowflake depends on the Snowflake Version that you have your account with. In these examples we have our Snowflake Account in Business Critical version which is the one of the most expensive versions but it has some special features for it (you can check from the link).

To Check Your Snowflake Usage History in Real-Time Using Snowflake API’s

Snowflake also provides a number of APIs and integration tools that allow customers to monitor their usage history in real-time. This can help customers identify potential issues before they become major problems. To view your Snowflake usage history in real-time using API’s, first you should match your snowflake account with an python program. To do so you can check here.

Once you have that, you can use the Snowflake usage REST API to access usage information for specific accounts, warehouses, and users. In addition you can use Snowflake usage Python Connector as well to retrive information.

Conclusion

Overall, Snowflake’s usage section helps you to track your Snowflake utilization in a detailed way and to identify areas where you might be overspending and helps you to make adjustments to optimize your usage and reduce costs. As a last reminder, your Snowflake usage is going to depend on various factors but one of them is your accounts Snowflake Edition.

Snowflake offers you some additional features to track automatically the usage and allows you to set some maximum credit usage values for the condition that you want specifically; these feature is named Resource Monitors.

In addition, Snowflake, even without your input, enhances data with its auto-clustering feature and helps you to reduce your usage.

To have additional information you can see my blog Snowflake’s Pricing Control.

Credits

https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/organization-usage

https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/account-usage

Auteur

  • Can Hobek

    Hello, my name is Can Höbek. I am originally from Turkey, and I currently live in Milan. In my second year of high school, I did a year of exchange in Turin to prepare myself for university and improve my Italian language. I am currently in my final year of bachelor degree in Politecnico di Torino in Management Engineering. During my time there, I was involved in various extracurricular activities, such as volunteer organizations that make science laboratories for primary school students with specific topics that point towards the 2030 goals , which helped me to develop my ability to work in a team and developed my soft-skills. From primary school up to last year of high school, for 10 years I went to conservatory school specializing in classic guitar. I always loved to play different instruments even though my professionality is on classic guitar. Another part that creates me is sports; I love all types of sports but I played professionally in some teams as a football, volleyball player. Before my last year of university I had started to think about my interests and did some research on how to improve myself on that. I found myself wanting to improve on the data and programming part that I started to learn in my first years of university. When I was doing these researches, I found Nimbus that offers first a formation on specific topics that was my area of interest and then gives us an opportunity to work on some projects that you have had formation. The most important part for me was to feel myself learning new things in my area of interest and then working on it.

Can Hobek

Hello, my name is Can Höbek. I am originally from Turkey, and I currently live in Milan. In my second year of high school, I did a year of exchange in Turin to prepare myself for university and improve my Italian language. I am currently in my final year of bachelor degree in Politecnico di Torino in Management Engineering. During my time there, I was involved in various extracurricular activities, such as volunteer organizations that make science laboratories for primary school students with specific topics that point towards the 2030 goals , which helped me to develop my ability to work in a team and developed my soft-skills. From primary school up to last year of high school, for 10 years I went to conservatory school specializing in classic guitar. I always loved to play different instruments even though my professionality is on classic guitar. Another part that creates me is sports; I love all types of sports but I played professionally in some teams as a football, volleyball player. Before my last year of university I had started to think about my interests and did some research on how to improve myself on that. I found myself wanting to improve on the data and programming part that I started to learn in my first years of university. When I was doing these researches, I found Nimbus that offers first a formation on specific topics that was my area of interest and then gives us an opportunity to work on some projects that you have had formation. The most important part for me was to feel myself learning new things in my area of interest and then working on it.