How to visualize Snowflake Warehouse costs in euros using Power BI

In this blog post, I'll demonstrate how you can create a Power BI report to visualize monthly Snowflake virtual warehouse costs in euros and make Snowflake costs visible even for those not having access to Snowflake console.

At the core of Snowflake are the virtual warehouses which enable unlimited scalability for computing. Data load, integration and visualization tools can have their own virtual warehouses. You can even provide a dedicated virtual warehouse for a business analyst who wants to query the raw data by himself.

You although want to ensure that Snowflake costs won’t skyrocket due to misuse of computational power what Snowflake provides so easily and the easiest way to do this is to visualize the virtual warehouse credit costs in Power BI (or similar tool) using Snowflake’s internal data dictionary and share the dashboard for relevant parties not having access to Snowflake console.

If you open any Snowflake database, you see that Snowflake databases come with INFORMATION_SCHEMA -schema included. INFORMATION_SCHEMA is Snowflake’s own data dictionary of all the stuff which are inside the database.

LOAD_HISTORY -view, for example, contains information of all files which are loaded into Snowflake. Do you want to know who has logged into Snowflake recently and what queries he or she has done? Just visit LOGIN_HISTORY and QUERY_HISTORY -views. Insides of INFORMATION_SCHEMA have been illustrated greatly in Kent Graziano’s “Using Snowflake Information Schema” so I won’t go more into details.

Our use case is to visualize the credit cost of virtual warehouses in Euros and for this, we will need:

1) Snowflake user who has access either to ACCOUNT_USAGE -schema or desired INFORMATION_SCHEMA’s.
2) PowerBI or similar BI -tool to visualize the warehouse credit usage

Finding correct schema and values which we need.

As we want to visualize credit usage of warehouses, we want to use WAREHOUSE_METERING_HISTORY -view. The view is located at two places, inside ACCOUNT_USAGE -schema and INFORMATION_SCHEMA inside every database (as information of historical and current usage of data are shared inside the account inside every INFORMATION_SCHEMA). This time we’re going to use ACCOUNT_USAGE -schema. The values which interest us are START_TIME, WAREHOUSE_NAME and CREDITS_USED.

Creating Power BI data sources

Power BI supports Snowflake, but before you can access Snowflake data, you need to download Snowflake ODBC -driver. Once you have the setup running, create a new data source using the “Get Data” -button. In my case, I have chosen “DV_WAREHOUSE_METERING_HISTORY_S” -table which is same as the WAREHOUSE_METERING_HISTORY -table, but is loaded weekly to provide historical data beyond one year.

The cost of warehouses are stored inside WAREHOUSE_METERING_HISTORY -table in CREDITS_USED column, but the Snowflake credits need to be converted into dollars and euro’s and grouped accordingly.

Add two new columns to the data set. Use the Modeling -tab and the “New Column” -button. Name first column as Dollar and one more column “Dollar” to the data and give it current value for dollar in euros. Currently one dollar is valued at 0,89 euros, so will give that value. In the future we can modify this value to be updated constantly, but for getting a best estimate for costs, a fixed value works fine.

Remember to give enough decimals for column so that Power BI won’t round up the value into one.

Create second column and give it name “Euro”. For this column, use following calculation. This calculation will count the sum the used credits and multiply the with the value of dollar. Outcome is the used credits in euros.

1 EURO = CALCULATE(SUM([CREDITS_USED])*CALCULATE(SUM(DV_WAREHOUSE_METERING_HISTORY_S[Dollar])))

Creating Power BI report

Once you have data sources ready, doing the final report is really easy. Add START_TIME (on month level) to AXIS, WAREHOUSE_NAME to LEGEND and finally EURO as value.

For this visualization, I have chosen a clustered column chart. You can add SUM of EURO to the dashboard to give it a final touch. I have also added a note that this does not include storage costs. The final result should look something like below.

Hopefully this short guidance will help you to visualize your Snowflake costs and ease the task of proofing that Snowflake is really cheap if you use it correctly.

For more information
https://docs.snowflake.net/manuals/sql-reference/functions/warehouse_metering_history.html
https://docs.snowflake.net/manuals/sql-reference/account-usage/warehouse_metering_history.html
https://docs.snowflake.net/manuals/sql-reference/info-schema.html
https://docs.snowflake.net/manuals/sql-reference/account-usage.html

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