Snowflake Usage Templates

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.

Summary of Content

Requirements
Usage Dashboard Types
Accessing Snowflake Account Usage Data in Sigma
      Setting a Role on your Connection
      Granting a Role permissions in Snowflake
Create a New Snowflake Usage Dashboard
Troubleshooting Q&A
Related Resources

Requirements

  • You must be an organization admin in Sigma.
  • Your connection must have access to the warehouse’s account usage data. Learn more

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
  • Storage Cost: Tracks storage cost by database and over 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

  1. Open your Admin Portal by selecting Administration in the user menu at the top right of your screen.

  2. Select the Connections page from the left hand panel.

  3. Select your connection from the connection list.

  4. 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.

  5. Enter the new Role.

  6. 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

  1. If you have not already, configure your Snowflake warehouse and its Sigma connection to access your warehouse Account Usage data.
  2. Once your Snowflake Usage data is available in Sigma, navigate to your Sigma Home Page.
  3. Under DASHBOARD TEMPLATES, select your desired template: Compute Cost, User Adoption, or Performance Monitoring. This will open the Create a Dashboard from a Template modal. 

  4. First, you will need to select your data source to be used by the template. By default, Sigma will attempt to select the appropriate data source.
    If one more data source options are found, you will see the screen pictured below. Select your source and a location for your new dashboard. Then click 'Create'. 
    Please note: If Sigma is unable to match a source to your selected template, you will be directed to manually select your source(s) from the Advanced Table Mapping View.
    Screen_Shot_2020-11-25_at_3.59.15_PM.png

  5. The remaining steps will walk you through the process of selecting data sources by means of the Advanced Table Mapping View.

  6. You now will be prompted to select a connection. Select your connection and click 'Next'.
    Please note: This step will be skipped automatically if you only have access to one connection.
    Screen_Shot_2020-12-07_at_2.44.02_PM_copy_2.png

  7. Select your desired source tables from the provided lists. 
    Screen_Shot_2020-12-08_at_9.36.52_AM.png

  8. Click Next to continue.
  9. Now it is time to select a destination for your new Dashboard and its sources.
    Select an existing folder or use the Create Folder button to create a new one. If you create a new folder, don’t forget to name and open it before continuing.
    Screen_Shot_2020-12-07_at_3.15.28_PM.png
  10. Click Add.
    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.
Screen_Shot_2020-07-01_at_3.18.02_PM.png

[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.

Related Resources

Dashboard Templates: An Overview
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