Cost Governance of the Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics Raw Data¶

General Recommendations¶

To determine the costs generated by the connector, you can create a separate account solely for the connector. Using a specific account lets you track the exact data transfer generated by the connector.

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

• To track storage costs more easily, create a separate database for storing ingested data.

• To determine exact compute costs, allocate a warehouse only for the connector.

• To build custom cost reports, use object tags on databases and the warehouse.

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 the credit quota too low in configurations where large volumes of data are ingested can prevent the connector from ingesting all the data. A major benefit is that the warehouse size can be adjusted to the data volume.

For information about how to check credits consumed by the warehouse, see 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>'

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 Raw Data stores data in two places:

• The connector database, which is created from the public share and 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 performed by the connector.

To check storage usage using Snowsight, you can use a separate database for storing ingested data. This lets you 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.

Data Transfer Cost¶

Snowflake charges only for egress traffic generated by the connector, based on the size of the requests from the connector to Google Analytics Raw Data. The responses from Google Analytics Raw Data do not generate cost on Snowflake side.

Information on data transfer usage is available only in the aggregated form for all external functions on the account level. To access the number of transferred bytes, use the DATA_TRANSFER_HISTORY view and filter by the EXTERNAL_ACCESS transfer type.

There can be additional fees related to data transfer on the BigQuery side: data storage + egress traffic. Specifically the connector uses whats referred to as Streaming reads (Storage Read API).

Please review the associated documentation for details.

Healthcheck Task Cost¶

The connector creates an internal, serverless task that regularly inspects the health of the instance, and sends a summary to Snowflake for monitoring purposes. The task is created after completing the installation wizard, or calling CONFIGURE_CONNECTION in a worksheet. It generates a fixed compute cost of up to 0.5 credits per day, even when no properties are enabled for ingestion.

The task cannot be explicitly suspended or dropped, however pausing the connector will also disable the healthcheck.