Cost Monitor

#Executive Summary

Cost Monitor is a governed, read-only Snowflake Native App that gives account teams, engineering managers, and finance stakeholders self-serve visibility into credit consumption, storage cost, and per-warehouse and per-user spend — without requiring ACCOUNTADMIN access.

It is designed as a companion to Query Monitor, a sibling app focused on query performance. Where Query Monitor answers “which queries are slow or failing?”, Cost Monitor answers the FinOps question every growing Snowflake account eventually faces: where is the money going, and what can we do about it?

Cost Monitor never creates, modifies, or deletes anything in your account. It reads a single set of SNOWFLAKE.ACCOUNT_USAGE views and renders them as an interactive Streamlit dashboard, entirely inside your own Snowflake account.

#Who this is for

• Engineering managers who need to see warehouse spend without ACCOUNTADMIN.
• FinOps / finance stakeholders who need a budget-vs-actual view they can check themselves.
• Platform teams who need to identify idle-warehouse waste and right-sizing opportunities.
• Anyone who has ever asked “why did our Snowflake bill go up this month?” and had to wait on someone else to run a query to find out.

#Key Features

#2.1 KPI Dashboard (always visible, above the tabs)

#2.2 Overview Tab

#2.3 Warehouses Tab

• Per-warehouse credit and cost ranking.
• Idle-time waste detection — credits billed for warehouse idle time vs. actual query execution — where your account has this data available.
• Full comparison table with CSV export.

#2.4 Users Tab

• Active Users, Avg Cost/User, Top User Share, and Top 5 Users Share — the last two are cost-concentration metrics that flag whether spend is broadly distributed or driven by one or two accounts.
• Daily spend-by-user chart, same stacking style as the warehouse chart.
• Top users by credits, ranked.
• Full per-user detail table: query count, active days, distinct warehouses touched, credits, estimated cost, average cost per query, and last-active timestamp.
• Top query tags by credits — the basis for chargeback/showback reporting.
• A multi-select User filter in the sidebar scopes this entire tab to one or more people at once.

#2.5 Storage Tab

• Storage composition trend: Active + Time Travel, Stage, and Fail-safe, over time.
• Per-database storage breakdown with estimated $/month.
• Top 15 tables by storage, flagged when a table’s Time Travel footprint exceeds its active data — a signal to shorten DATA_RETENTION_TIME.

#2.6 Forecast & Budget Tab

• Month-to-date spend and a linear run-rate projection to month end.
• Budget utilization with days-remaining context.
• A count of days where Cloud Services usage exceeded Snowflake’s 10% free-allowance threshold and was actually billed.

#2.7 Cross-Cutting Features

• Spend anomaly detection — flags any day whose spend exceeds 1.5× its own trailing 7-day average.
• Configurable $/credit and $/TB-month rates — every dollar figure is a labeled estimate, not an invoice.
• CSV export on every tab.
• An in-app “About & data sources” panel documenting exactly which ACCOUNT_USAGE views power each number.

#3. How It Works — Architecture

Cost Monitor is built with Streamlit in Snowflake, running on Snowpark Python. The application executes entirely inside your Snowflake account’s compute — no data is exported to an external service, and no third party ever sees your account usage data.

#3.1 Data Sources