In today’s data-driven world, Snowflake has become a go-to cloud data platform for companies of all sizes. Its scalability, performance, and flexibility are unmatched. However, with great power comes great responsibility. It can be a challenge to manage your Snowflake costs, especially as your Snowflake infrastructure grows.
Ternary is a multi-cloud FinOps platform designed specifically for greater visibility into your cloud services. Is Snowflake one of the services you use? If so, you’ll want to explore the blog below to discover powerful features that set Ternary apart in this space. These include our ability to provide granular visibility and actionable insights related to your Snowflake usage. We help our customers and partners reduce costs, without sacrificing performance. Read on to learn how.
Snowflake: a cloud-based warehousing platform designed for scale
Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing platform designed to enable the storage, processing, and analysis of large amounts of data. Unlike traditional data warehouses (e.g., Oracle Exadata, Teradata, or IBM DB2), Snowflake is built specifically for the cloud. That means Snowflake can scale up or down quickly to accommodate fluctuating data workloads.
But it also means your monthly bill can scale up and down unexpectedly. Snowflake allows organizations to process and analyze large volumes of data in real time or near real time. The platform is widely used in industries such as finance, health care, retail, and technology.
Ternary’s Snowflake integration: easy setup, powerful controls and insights
Ternary supports Snowflake billing data and warehouse insights to give you a comprehensive understanding of your usage and costs. We not only report on Snowflake spend data; we also give you insight into your Snowflake usage data (e.g., query count, total query run time, credits consumed).
What makes Ternary stand out among platforms that support Snowflake?
- Setup and configuration. With Ternary, it’s easy and quick to begin ingesting data. We also provide granular controls to ensure you can limit the data ingested.
- Resource utilization engine. Ternary provides out-of-the-box insights into your Snowflake usage by account and warehouses, as shown below. You can see your query count and run times, as well as the number and type of credits you’ve used. With Ternary’s insights, you can avoid over-provisioning (i.e., paying for resources you’re not using) or under-provisioning (which can slow down performance).
- Reporting engine. With our powerful and flexible reporting engine, you can build custom reports for specific teams, business units, or departments.
- Full cost allocation. Ternary supports allocating all of your Snowflake costs to the appropriate areas of your organization. You can allocate traditional cloud service provider costs alongside Snowflake costs, to determine total cost of ownership accurately.
Case study: Ternary’s Snowflake support in action
Managing costs across multiple platforms is essential for efficient budgeting and planning, especially for teams with extensive data needs. One of our customers, with a large data science and data engineering organization, faced exactly this challenge as they scaled up their use of both Snowflake and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
This team uses Snowflake as their data warehouse solution, relying on the cloud for the bulk of their processing and storage. But managing and tracking Snowflake costs alongside their AWS spending became increasingly difficult, especially when multiple projects were sharing the same resources.
Lacking a solution to consolidate these costs, the data science team struggled to get a clear view of their operations’ total spend. Despite best efforts to manually track and allocate Snowflake costs, their finance and operations teams found it challenging to fully understand what it cost to support their data science activities. Without this insight, their budgeting and resource allocation were less accurate, posing an increased risk of overspending.
To address these challenges, the team turned to Ternary, the multi-cloud cost management solution that integrates Snowflake and AWS cost and usage. With Ternary, the team seamlessly incorporated their Snowflake usage into a unified cost center reporting structure with their corresponding AWS usage, providing a single, accurate view of their spending.
Using Ternary to integrate Snowflake and AWS spend unlocked immediate benefits:
- Unified cost tracking. Instead of relying on separate reports and estimates, they could see all of their costs: compute, storage, data transfer, and more, in a single view.
- Budget accuracy. With comprehensive cost visibility, the team could fine-tune their budget allocation. Instead of guessing about their Snowflake expenses, they knew exactly where their budget was going, helping them to better plan and allocate resources across projects.
- Enhanced accountability. The integrated view allowed each team to take accountability for their own spend. Data science and data engineering teams could now track their usage patterns and proactively control costs.
Without Ternary, the customer’s Snowflake and AWS costs would have remained siloed, making it difficult to understand their cloud spending comprehensively. By incorporating Snowflake costs into their AWS cost management practice, the data science and data engineering teams implemented a complete, accurate, data-driven approach to optimizing their cloud usage. As a result, they can now plan and grow with confidence.
Take the next step
Are you seeking strategies to manage your Snowflake costs, gaining clear, integrated spend visibility into multi-cloud services? If so, book a demo with Ternary to see how we can help you gain the insights you need to manage your spend effectively, in Snowflake and each of the other major clouds.
