Snowflake

Snowflake bills by the credit, and a warehouse that stays resumed overnight burns credits whether or not anyone queries it. ZopNight connects to your Snowflake account, discovers its warehouses and storage objects, prices them from your own usage data, suspends warehouses outside working hours, and flags Snowflake configuration that costs more than it needs to.

Settings → Cloud Accounts: a Snowflake account connected with key-pair authentication, alongside the other cloud accounts.

Before you start

• ZopNight permission: cloud-account:create, which the built-in Admin role has.
• A Snowflake user for ZopNight that signs in with either a key pair (the public key registered on the user) or a programmatic access token (PAT).
• A role for that user that can read the SNOWFLAKE.ACCOUNT_USAGE views and run SHOW commands on the objects you want discovered. ZopNight reads cost and inventory from these.
• To suspend and resume warehouses on a schedule: the same role must be able to suspend and resume those warehouses, and the account must be connected at the Read + Write permission level. See Read-only vs read + write.
• Your Snowflake account host. ZopNight reads the underlying cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure) from it, so there is no cloud to pick.

How it works

Snowflake is a standalone connection. It does not ride an AWS, GCP, or Azure cloud account, even though your Snowflake account runs on one. ZopNight reads inventory and usage from SNOWFLAKE.ACCOUNT_USAGE and SHOW queries, and changes nothing in the account except suspending and resuming warehouses you schedule.

What gets discovered

ZopNight discovers nine Snowflake resource types. Five are top-level; the other four sit under the database that holds them.

Type	Level	Notes
account	Top-level	The Snowflake account itself
warehouse	Top-level	Virtual warehouses; the only type you can start and stop
database	Top-level	Parent of tables, materialized views, stages, and pipes
user	Top-level	Snowflake users
resource-monitor	Top-level	Credit quotas attached to warehouses or the account
table	Under its database	The schema is part of the resource ID
materialized-view	Under its database	The schema is part of the resource ID
stage	Under its database	Stages used for loading data
pipe	Under its database	Snowpipe ingestion pipes

Everything shows in the standard Inventory view with the rest of your estate.

How cost is calculated

Snowflake cost is usage-based:

• Compute: warehouse credits consumed, multiplied by the credit rate for your Snowflake edition.
• Storage: active bytes per table.

ZopNight reconciles these figures against your own SNOWFLAKE.ACCOUNT_USAGE billing views, so the totals match what Snowflake reports for the account.

Connect an account

1. Open the wizard

   Go to Settings → Cloud Accounts → Add Cloud Account and pick Snowflake.

2. Choose the auth method

   Pick Key-pair JWT or PAT and enter the account and credential details the wizard asks for.

3. Verify

   ZopNight checks the credential against Snowflake before it saves the account. If the check fails, nothing is saved and the wizard shows the reason.

The connected account appears on Settings → Cloud Accounts next to your other accounts.

Suspend warehouses on a schedule

Warehouses use the same schedules, groups, and overrides as VMs and clusters.

Schedule action	What ZopNight runs
Stop	ALTER WAREHOUSE ... SUSPEND
Start	ALTER WAREHOUSE ... RESUME

Suspending a warehouse stops credit consumption and keeps its configuration, so a resume brings back the same warehouse. Only warehouses are schedulable; databases, tables, and the other types are read-only.

Snowflake recommendations

Twenty rules run against Snowflake warehouses, tables, materialized views, pipes, stages, and the account. They are part of the main rule catalogue, not a separate set. What they catch:

Object	What the rules flag
Warehouses	Auto-suspend unset, zero, or over 120 seconds; idle (credits burned with no queries over 14 days); oversized or undersized for the load; under-utilised (active under 4 hours a day); minimum or maximum cluster count set wider than the load needs; statement timeout left at the 48-hour default; no resource monitor attached; missing team, cost-centre, or environment tags.
Tables	Time Travel retention longer than needed; large Fail-safe on permanent tables; Auto-Clustering or Search Optimization that costs more than the queries it speeds up.
Materialized views	Refresh cost higher than the query benefit.
Pipes	Snowpipe ingesting many small files.
Stages	No COPY in over 30 days.
Account	A premium edition worth reviewing.

Two of these 20 rules, for large cold tables and for a steady baseline that may suit capacity pricing, need 90 days of history. They are in the catalogue but do not raise findings yet.

Five of these carry a dollar saving, priced on the same credit rate as your cost data: idle warehouse, oversized warehouse, Auto-Clustering, Search Optimization, and materialized-view refresh. The rest are advisory configuration changes with no computed saving. If ZopNight cannot price a finding, it does not raise a zero-dollar recommendation.

You make these changes in Snowflake. ZopNight does not change warehouse, table, or account settings. The Snowflake rules cover cost only, and there are no Snowflake security or compliance rules. See the rule catalogue for the full list.

Troubleshooting

Next steps