Snowflake - Amazon Managed Grafana
OverviewGet started with the Snowflake pluginAdditional functionality

Snowflake

With the Snowflake Enterprise data source, you can visualize your Snowflake data alongside all of your other data sources in Grafana as well as log and metric data in context. This data source includes a powerful type-ahead query editor, supports complex annotations, set alerting thresholds, control access and permissions and more.

Note

This data source is for Grafana Enterprise only. For more information, see Manage access to Enterprise plugins.

Additionally, in workspaces that support version 9 or newer, this data source might require you to install the appropriate plugin. For more information, see Grafana plugins.

Overview

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake offers a cloud-based data storage and analytics service, generally termed "data warehouse-as-a-service" that offers a solution for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and data sharing. Over the last few years, Snowflake has gained massive popularity because of its ability to affordably store and analyze data using cloud-based hardware and software; recently culminating in the largest software IPO ever. Today, many companies use Snowflake as their primary database to store application and business data such as transaction counts, active user sessions, and even time series and metric data.

Making the most of Snowflake and Amazon Managed Grafana

Visualize Snowflake data without moving it: Grafana’s unique architecture queries data directly where it lives rather than moving it and paying for redundant storage and ingestion.

Compose panels from varied sources: With pre-built and custom dashboards, bring data together from many different data sources into a single pane of glass.

Transform and compute at the user level: Users can transform data and run various computations on data they see, requiring less data preparation.

Combine, compute, and visualize within panels: Create mixed-data source panels that display related data from Snowflake and other sources.

Features

Query editor: The query editor is a Smart SQL autocompletion editor that allows you to visualize time series or table data, handles SQL syntax errors, and autocompletes basic SQL keywords.

Data source permissions: Control who can view or query Snowflake data in Grafana

Annotations: Overlay Snowflake events on any Grafana graph, to correlate events with other graph data

Alerting: Set alerts based metrics stores in Snowflake

Variables for queries: Create template variables in Grafana based on Snowflake data, and include variables in Snowflake queries to make interactive dashboards.

Multi-metric queries: Write a single query that returns multiple metrics, each in its own column

Get started with the Snowflake plugin

Here are five quick steps to get started with the Snowflake plugin in Grafana:

Step 1: Set up the Snowflake Data Source

To configure the data source, choose Configuration, Data Sources, Add data source, Snowflake.

Add your authentication details, and the data source is ready to query!

The following configuration fields are available.

Name Description
Account Account for Snowflake.
Username Username for the service account.
Password Password for the service account.
Schema (optional) Sets a default schema for queries.
Warehouse (optional) Sets a default warehouse for queries.
Database (optional) Sets a default database for queries.
Role (optional) Assumes a role for queries.

Step 2: Write queries for your Snowflake data

Create a panel in a dashboard, and select a Snowflake Data Source to start using the query editor.

  • Date / time can appear anywhere in the query as long as it is included.

  • A numerical column must be included. This can be an aggregation or an int/float column.

  • Optionally, you can include string columns to create separate data series, if your time series data is formatted for different metrics.

Layout of a Snowflake query


select
  <time_column>,
  <any_numerical_column>
  <other_column_1>,
  <other_column_2>,
  <...>
from
  <any_table>
where
  $__timeFilter(<time_column>) // predefined where clause for time range
  and $<custom_variable> = 1 // custom variables start with dollar sign

SQL query format for time series group by interval


select
  $__timeGroup(created_ts, '1h'), // group time by interval of 1h
  <time_column>, 
  <any_numerical_column>,
  <metric_column>
from
  <any_table>
where
  $__timeFilter(<time_column>) // predefined where clause for time range
  and $<custom_variable> = 1 // custom variables start with dollar sign
group by <time_column>

SQL query format for tables


select
  <time_column>, // optional if result format option is table
  <any_column_1>
  <any_column_2>
  <any_column_3>
from
  <any_table>
where
  $__timeFilter(time_column) // macro for time range, optional if format as option is table
  and $<custom_variable> = 1 // custom variables start with dollar sign

Step 3: Create and use Template Variables

Using template variables

You can include template variables in queries, as shown in the following example. 


 select
   <column>
 from 
   <table>
 WHERE column >= '$variable'

The following example shows using multi-value variables in a query. 


select
  <column>
from 
  <table>
WHERE <column> regexp '${variable:regex}'

Using the Snowflake data source to create variables

In the dashboard settings, choose Variables, and choose New.

Using the "Query" variable type, select the Snowflake data source as the "Data source".

Important

Be sure to select only one column in your variable query.

Example: 


SELECT DISTINCT query_type from account_usage.query_history;

will give you these variables: 


All DESCRIBE USE UNKNOWN GRANT SELECT CREATE DROP SHOW

Step 4: Set up an alert

You can set alerts on specific Snowflake metrics or on queries you’ve created.

Choose the alert tab button within the query editor, and choose Create Alert.

Step 5. Create an annotation

Annotations allow you to overlay events on a graph.

To create an annotation, in the dashboard settings, choose Annotations, and New, and select Snowflake as the data source.

Because annotations are events, they require at least one time column and one column to describe the event.

The following example code shows a query to annotate all failed logins to Snowflake. 


SELECT
  EVENT_TIMESTAMP as time,
  EVENT_TYPE,
  CLIENT_IP
FROM ACCOUNT_USAGE.LOGIN_HISTORY
WHERE $__timeFilter(time) AND IS_SUCCESS!='YES'
ORDER BY time ASC;

And

  • time: TIME

  • title: EVENT_TYPE

  • text: CLIENT_IP

This will overlay annotations of all failed logins to Snowflake on your dashboard panels.

Additional functionality

Using the Display Name field

This plugin uses the Display Name field in the Field tab of the Options panel to shorten or alter a legend key based on its name, labels, or values. Other data sources use custom alias functionality to modify legend keys, but the Display Name function is a more consistent way to do so.

Data source permissions

Limit access to Snowflake by choosing the Permissions tab in the data source configuration page to enable data source permissions. On the permission page, Admins can enable permissions and restrict query permissions to specific Users and Teams.

Understand your Snowflake billing and usage data

Within the Snowflake data source, you can import a billing and usage dashboard that shows you useful billing and usage information.

Add the dashboard in the Snowflake Data Source configuration page:

This dashboard uses the ACCOUNT_USAGE database, and requires the querier to have the ACCOUNTADMIN role. To do this securely, create a new Grafana data source that has a user with the ACCOUNTADMIN role. Then select that data source in the variables.