Connecting to Snowflake

Connect your Snowflake account to CloudZero to bring your Snowflake cost and usage data, including Cortex AI spend, into a unified view of all your cloud and SaaS spend. CloudZero organizes your Snowflake costs, along with your other costs, into categories (called Dimensions) that matter most to your business. For example: business unit, team, product, feature, environment, customer, or virtually anything else. Once connected and organized, you can quickly answer questions about your spend that matter to your stakeholders.

This guide covers configuring a Snowflake connection and running the CloudZero SQL script in your Snowflake account. CloudZero connects through Snowflake's Secure Data Sharing, establishing a share from your account to CloudZero's Snowflake account in the same region. All access is read-only.

What you need

• CloudZero user with admin permissions
• Snowflake account with permissions to create roles, databases, procedures, and shares (the SQL script creates read-only resources)
• Your Snowflake contract pricing:

Step 1: Configure the connection in CloudZero

1. In CloudZero, go to Settings > Cloud Connections.

2. Select Create Connection + and select the Snowflake tile.

3. Enter the connection details:

   Field	Value
   Connection Name	A display name for this connection in CloudZero
   Cost Per Credit	Your Snowflake Capacity Credit Price
   Cost Per TB Month	Your Snowflake Capacity Storage Price
   Cost Effective Date	The date your pricing took effect. If your pricing has not changed since the account was created, use the account creation date.
   Snowflake Account ID	Run SELECT LOWER(CURRENT_ACCOUNT()); in Snowflake
   Snowflake Account Region	Run the following in Snowflake: SHOW REGIONS; SELECT display_name FROM TABLE(RESULT_SCAN(LAST_QUERY_ID())) WHERE snowflake_region = CURRENT_REGION();

4. Select Save. A SQL script appears on the next screen.

Step 2: Run the CloudZero SQL script in Snowflake

1. Copy the SQL script from the CloudZero screen.
2. Paste it into a Snowflake worksheet in your account.
3. Select the All Queries checkbox.
4. Select Run.

Step 3: Verify the connection

Return to Settings > Cloud Connections in CloudZero and refresh. Your Snowflake connection appears in the Billing Connections table.

What to expect

After CloudZero discovers the share, the connection status changes from Pending Data to Healthy:

• Discovery: Up to an hour after the SQL script completes.
• Cost data in Explorer: Up to 24 hours for the initial sync.
• Additional accounts: Connect each Snowflake account individually using the same process.

If CloudZero loses access to the share, the connection status changes and displays details about the issue.

You can also query your CloudZero cost data directly from your own Snowflake account. See Query CloudZero Data in Snowflake for setup instructions.

Connection details

Tag support

Snowflake tags are available in CloudZero for serverless features but not for standard warehouse queries:

If tags are not appearing for a serverless feature, verify the tag is applied to the object, schema, or database in your Snowflake account using the TAG_REFERENCES view.

Permissions

All CloudZero access is read-only. The SQL script in Step 2 creates the following resources in your Snowflake account and establishes a share to CloudZero:

The script grants read access to the following tables and views:

CloudZero also collects Cortex AI usage data to surface AI-driven spend alongside the rest of your Snowflake costs:

Maintenance and configuration

Deleting a connection

Snowflake connections cannot be deleted through the CloudZero UI. Contact your account manager to remove a Snowflake connection.

Updating a manual connection

If you have a non-us-east-1 Snowflake connection that uses the legacy S3-based ingestion method, update the IAM trust relationship. See Update a Legacy Snowflake Connection for details.