Snowflake Monitor: The fastest way to understand your Snowflake costs and get more value from every credit
- Mia isaacson
- Sep 28
- 4 min read
Snowflake has become the platform of choice for accelerating modern analytics stacks, powering dashboards and analytics experiences, fueling data-driven decisions, and giving teams the scale they need to work with massive datasets.
Organizations strive to increase adoption and engagement in their analytics investments. As more people engage with analytics, pressure on data, storage, and processing layers grows. With Snowflake’s usage-based pricing, this activity can quickly lead to unexpected bills. And when spend is aggregated into a single number, it’s nearly impossible to see which workloads, warehouses, or users are driving the largest costs.
That’s why we built the Snowflake Monitor, our newest plugin, and the fastest way to understand your Snowflake costs to ensure you’re getting more value from every credit. The Snowflake Monitor is designed to bring clarity and control to your Snowflake spend.
The Snowflake Monitor connects directly to your existing Snowflake environment using the standard Account Usage and Organization Usage schemas. That means no custom ETL pipelines and no workarounds.
This plugin comes ready with a pre-built Elasticube and a set of curated dashboards, ready to go out of the box, delivering accurate, up-to-date information, ready to analyze in minutes.
Snowflake spend is business data and shouldn’t be locked away in admin-only views
With Snowflake Monitor, data is available as self-service analytics so teams can answer their own questions instead of waiting on admins or data engineers to pull reports. This democratization of cost insights gives engineering, finance, infrastructure, and leadership teams the visibility they need without exposing sensitive admin-level access.
This not only reduces the reporting burden on the small group with direct Snowflake access but also accelerates decision-making across the business. Everyone gets the insights they need when they need them. And because dashboards are built in Sisense, they can be shared widely and enriched with powerful features like trend analysis and explainers. And using data directly from Snowflake’s standard Account Usage and Organization Usage schemas ensures the data is always accurate and up to date.
The result is clear: visual dashboards that surface high-cost drivers, highlight optimization opportunities, and provide actionable insights for both technical teams and executives.
The first step to controlling Snowflake spend is understanding the true cost drivers
Too often, costs are aggregated in a single bill, making it nearly impossible to know what the spend is (in dollars) and where it comes from (in credits). Finance teams see only the final dollar amount, while engineering teams are left guessing which warehouses, workloads, or users drove the underlying credit consumption. That’s the pain: one opaque bill, two different units of cost, and no visibility into the details.
The Snowflake Monitor dashboards put cost front and center and untangle the confusion between dollars vs. credits and what vs. where. Every dashboard is designed to transform costs from a black-box line item into an actionable, transparent story for everyone:
Credits used across Tasks, Materialized Views, and Warehouses
Highlight users with the highest credit consumption
Dollarized view of spend for finance and budget tracking
6-month trend lines to show spend over time and highlight anomalies or spikes
Forecasting to project upcoming costs based on usage
Finance teams finally see the dollar view they need to manage budgets, and Engineering teams can trace credit consumption to specific workloads and validate provisioning decisions. Executives get a clean summary that connects usage patterns to business outcomes.
Instead of one opaque number at the end of the month, teams gain a shared source of truth. Now the conversation shifts. It’s no longer “Why is our bill so high?” but “Here’s exactly which workloads and users are driving spend—and here’s what we can do about it.”
Seeing costs is only half the battle
The real frustration for Snowflake teams comes after the bill arrives: even if you know which workloads are driving spend, it’s hard to know what to do next. Do you scale down warehouses? Rewrite queries? Kill idle resources? Without clear guidance, teams often fall into “cost whack-a-mole,” reacting to spikes without ever fixing the root issues.
Snowflake Monitor dashboards are designed not just to show where money is going, but to spotlight exactly which optimizations will have the biggest impact. With Snowflake Monitor, teams can:
Identify long-running queries (over 5 minutes) that could be tuned for efficiency
Spot warehouses that sit idle but still rack up costs
Surface the queries with the worst scan efficiency that slow down performance and waste credits
Highlight the top 15 most expensive queries, so teams know where to focus first
It’s not just about saving money. It’s about making sure every Snowflake credit delivers maximum value.
Each of these is a direct call to action—not just a report of what’s wrong, but a pointer to where to fix it. By calling out these hotspots, Snowflake Monitor empowers technical teams to:
Fine-tune their environment for better efficiency
Cut unnecessary credit consumption without sacrificing performance
Strategically allocate resources instead of overprovisioning
Snowflake is an incredible platform—but without visibility, it’s all too easy for costs to spiral out of control and for teams to be left in the dark. Snowflake Monitor brings clarity, accountability, and action to your Snowflake spend, making every credit work harder for your business. From aligning finance and engineering with a shared view of costs, to surfacing the optimizations that drive both savings and performance, it’s the fastest way to turn an opaque bill into a clear roadmap for improvement.
And here’s the simple truth: Snowflake cost data isn’t just a bill—it’s business data. If you’re running your business in Sisense, your Snowflake costs belong there too. By bringing cost insights into the same trusted analytics environment your teams already use, Snowflake Monitor unlocks clarity, accountability, and action across the organization. Your analytics platform should tell the full story of your business—and that includes Snowflake costs.
Ready to take control of your Snowflake costs
and unlock more value from every credit?
The Snowflake Monitor is now available to all Sisense customers using Snowflake.
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