Cost Governance of the Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics Aggregate Data

The Snowflake connector for Google Analytics Aggregate Data is subject to the Connector Terms.

This topic provides best practices for cost governance and finding the optimal warehouse size for the Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics Aggregate Data.

Measuring Cost of the Connector

If the connector has a separate account only for data ingestion and storage, and the account shows no other activity (such as executing queries by users using the ingested data), you can read the overall cost on the account level. To learn more, refer to Exploring Overall Cost.

If the account is not dedicated only to the connector or you need to investigate the costs further, you should analyze the charged costs for the components separately:

For an introduction to these three components of cost, refer to Understanding Overall Cost.

General Recommendations

To obtain cost generated by the connector, we recommend that you create a separate account solely for using the connector. Using a specific account you track the exact data transfer generated by the connector.

If you cannot use a separate account for the connector, consider the following:

  • Create a separate database for storing ingested data to track storage cost easier.

  • Allocate a warehouse only for the connector to get the exact compute cost.

  • Use object tags on databases and a warehouse to build custom cost reports.

Compute Cost

We recommend that you create a dedicated warehouse only for the connector. This configuration allows you to create resource monitors on the warehouse. You can use the monitors to send email alerts and suspend the warehouse, stopping the connector when the set credit quota is exceeded. The connector automatically resumes after the credit quota is renewed. Note that setting credit quota too low in configurations where large volumes of data are ingested may cause the connector to not ingest all data. A major benefit is that the warehouse size can be adjusted to the data volume.

For information on how to check credits consumed by the warehouse, refer to Exploring Compute Cost. You can also assign object tags to the warehouse and use the tags to create cost reports.

If the warehouse used by the connector is used by other workflows, you can split the cost by roles. To split usage by roles, use the query for splitting warehouse usage and add the following WHERE clause on the QUERY_HISTORY view:

WAREHOUSE_NAME = '<connector warehouse name>' AND
ROLE_NAME = '<role created for the connector to ingest data>'
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Note that the role is the name created when the connector was installed, for example SNOWFLAKE_CONNECTOR_FOR_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_RAW_DATA.

The query gives only an approximation of the cost.

Storage Cost

The Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics Aggregate Data stores data in two places:

  • The connector database, which is created from the public share and which holds the connector internal state.

  • The user-specified schema where the ingested data is stored.

Data storage is also used by the Snowflake Fail-safe feature. The amount of data stored in Fail-safe depends on the table updates done by the connector.

If you want to check storage usage using Snowsight, we recommend that you use a separate database for storing ingested data. This way you can filter the graphs for storage usage by object, which shows usage by individual database. You can also view storage use by querying the DATABASE_STORAGE_USAGE_HISTORY view and filtering by databases used by the connector.

If the database contains other schemas not related to the connector, you can query storage usage of a specific schema that is dedicated to the data ingested from the connector. You can get the information from the TABLE_STORAGE_METRICS view after filtering by database and schema names and aggregating columns with storage usage.

Determining optimal warehouse size for the connector instance

For the Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics Aggregate Data, we recommend starting using an XSMALL warehouse and than experimenting with larger warehouse to possibly improve performance.

To find the optimal warehouse size for the connector, you should consider the

  • Number of configured reports

  • Amount of data produced by each report

  • Schedule of synchronizing reports

We recommend that you define a set of measurable expectations, such as time intervals in which all reports should be synchronized, and pick the smallest warehouse size that meets these expectations. To determine if you need a larger warehouse, see Monitoring warehouse load.

Healthcheck Task Cost

The connector creates a serverless task that will regularly check health status of your app instance and send only the summarized result (if it’s healthy or not) to Snowflake. The task is created after completing the installation wizard (or calling FINALIZE_CONNECTOR_CONFIGURATION in worksheets). It runs in the background and generates a fixed cost of up to 0.5 credit/day even if no report is configured.

The task cannot be manually stopped or dropped. However, to reduce this cost you can call PAUSE_CONNECTOR procedure which will disable the task and not generate any cost when the connector is unused.

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