Sigma offers easy to use templates to create presentation-ready dashboards displaying your Snowflake account usage data. These dashboards can be used to quickly dive into understanding and sharing your organization’s Snowflake usage.
Usage Dashboard Types
- Compute Cost: tracks cost by warehouse over time
- User Adoption: tracks how users are using warehouses and databases
- Performance Monitoring: tracks database, warehouse, and individual query performance
Requirements
- You must be an organization admin in Sigma.
- Your connection must have access to the warehouse’s account usage data. Learn more
How do Templates Work?
For each given use case, templates can cut out the need for your team to model data, build new reports, and create visualizations. Instead, Sigma generates all of these directly from your connection with the click of a button.
When you create a new dashboard from a template, Sigma will automatically create any associated Datasets, worksheets, and visualizations necessary to create the dashboard. You will be the owner of this generated content, and can edit it to customize the dashboard at any time.
Accessing Snowflake Account Usage Data in Sigma
Before you can take advantage of these templates, you will need to grant the `Role` used for your Sigma connection to Snowflake access to your warehouse’s `ACCOUNT_USAGE` schema.
Setting a Role on your Connection
-
Open your Admin Portal by selecting ‘Administration’ in the user menu at the top right of your screen.
-
Select the ‘Connections’ page from the left hand panel.
-
Select your connection from the connection list.
-
The current `Role` will be listed under `Connection Credentials`.
If you would like to change this role, click the blue `Edit` button under `Connection Details`. -
Enter the new ‘Role’.
-
Click ‘Save’.
Granting a Role permissions in Snowflake
To learn how you can grant a Snowflake role permission to your warehouse’s `ACCOUNT_USAGE` schema, visit Snowflake’s Account Usage documentation.
Create a New Snowflake Usage Dashboard
-
Open the Connections section of the left hand navigation panel.
-
Select your connection from the list. This will open a list of nested databases, schemas and tables in your connection.
-
Click on the ‘ACCOUNT_USAGE’ schema to open the database page.
-
Navigate to the `Templates` tab from the top of the page.
Here you will see the list of dashboard types you can choose from.
-
Click the ‘Create’ button for the template you would like to use.
-
The ‘Choose a Destination’ modal will prompt you to select where you would like to create your new dashboard.
Choose a location and click ‘Create’.
From here you will be routed directly to your new dashboard!
Troubleshooting Q&A
Question: My Snowflake Usage Dashboards are slow to load and/or time out. Why? What can I do to improve their performance?
Answer: Slow load times and query timeouts typically occur when the warehouse is struggling to respond to a request. This is often due to warehouse size. In response to slow load times, Sigma will time out a request if the query is still running after 2 minutes.
To check on your query run times and view timeouts, visit your dashboard’s Query display modal.
There are a couple ways you can improve your dashboard performance.
[Option 1] The quickest way to speed up your usage dashboard load time is to filter the date to a smaller date range. `ACCOUNT_USAGE` tables are partitioned by time, so filtering by the date may improve performance.
[Option 2] To improve your usage dashboard’s performance when working with large or low-performing data sets, we recommend increasing your Snowflake warehouse size to medium or larger. You may also want to create a new connection in Sigma specifically for using Snowflake Usage Templated Dashboards.