[Disclaimer: I work for a company that offers a Snowflake Cost Optimizer product]
We’re an open-source monitoring & alerting tool and many of our users were using it to set alerts on their warehousing (Snowflake) costs. The problem with Snowflake is particularly worse due to its lack of query level attribution of costs and no in-built features for monitoring or recommendations on improvements. We’re building a Snowflake Cost Optimizer (https://www.chaosgenius.io/snowflake-cost-optimizer.html) and are hearing the same feedback from our customers as the author mentions. Snowflake is definitely coming up with features towards better cost transparency but I wonder if it’s too little too late.
In my experience Snowflake is very receptive to enhancement requests. If you feel Snowflake should be doing something better for surfacing optimizations, I'd ask them.
That said, I'm not sure your comment is fully accurate:
1) "lack of query level attribution of costs"
Snowflake doesn't charge per query so there can't be default query level attribution of cost. Snowflake charges by second of warehouse use. But you CAN easily see which queries ran on which warehouse and allocate costs back to that using your own criteria (by query second, usually better than by number of queries).
2) "no in-built features for monitoring"
Snowflake has built in cost monitoring dashboards:
https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cost-overview.html
And resource monitors:
https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/resource-monitors.h...
That said, I'm sure improvements could be made. Ask for them. There must be a market for this because Capital One and Acceldata and others offer similar solutions for optimization recommendations.
