19 COST MANAGEMENT, MONITORING, AND TRANSPARENCY Resource monitors and alerts provide an easy way to manage resources and suspend when certain thresholds are exceeded. Snowflake’s Snowsight admin dashboard is a very useful tool for monitoring and understanding usage; it provides at-a-glance information about organizations, consumption, storage, and more (see Figure 1). Snowflake also provides summary and detailed usage metrics for many services used so you can understand the spend and monitor and manage billings. The Snowflake database consists of Organization_Usage, Account_Usage, Reader_ Account_Usage, and Data_Sharing_Usage. 19 Organization_Usage views provide summary usage data for all the accounts in an organization. Account_Usage views provide information specific to a particular account, including: • Credits consumed by virtual warehouses • Storage costs • Credits consumed by other Snowflake services such as Snowpipe, Automatic Clustering, materialized views, search optimization, and serverless tasks • History of all the queries with key performance metrics (such as execution time, bytes scanned, bytes spilled to remote storage, and query load percent) • Access history and login history • Single account with dedicated resources. – Dedicated compute (virtual warehouses) and dedicated database objects: Dedicated compute nodes for each customer allow data providers to accurately measure usage and scale horizontally as needed. Similarly, with dedicated database objects, it is easy to measure storage usage and understand consumption trends. – Dedicated compute (virtual warehouses) and shared database objects: In this model, storage usage will need to be allocated to customers based on customer-specific data volumes. Snowflake’s object tagging and storage metrics at table level allow customers to allocate the storage costs appropriately. Although maintenance of database objects is easier with this approach, dedicated storage has the benefit of reducing overall complexity. • Single account with shared resources. Allocating usage for shared resources to different customers using traditional methods can be difficult. With Snowflake object tagging and query tagging features, you can easily allocate usage with a simple ratio to report window function. SERVERLESS CAPABILITIES Snowflake’s serverless capabilities enable data providers to run tasks on behalf of their customers in a serverless way. Tag the tasks that include customer information, and you can easily share usage information. Because the workload is fully dedicated, tasks will perform better and be more efficient—a big plus for providers offering usage-based pricing to their customers. Figure 1: Snowsight, the Snowflake web interface, includes dashboards to help visualize data critical to consumption-based pricing models. CHAMPION GUIDES