Snowflake data visualization: all the latest features to monitor metrics, enhance security, and more

In 2020, we introduced the Snowflake Enterprise data source for Grafana, allowing users to seamlessly pull data from the Snowflake cloud-based data storage and analytics service into Grafana dashboards. Available for Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud users, it’s a powerful way to not only query and visualize Snowlake data, but to do so alongside other data sources, so you can discover correlations and other meaningful insights within minutes. 

In 2023, we also announced the Snowflake dedicated integration for Grafana Cloud, providing two pre-built dashboards — the Snowflake Data Ownership (pictured below) dashboard and Snowflake Overview dashboard — to help users monitor their Snowflake Data Cloud usage and billing metrics. The integration also introduced a set of six Snowflake-related alerts automatically installed into your Grafana Cloud account.

And the progress hasn’t stopped there. In this blog post, we recap some recent updates — from new pre-built dashboards to more robust security options — that further enhance the user experience when visualizing and managing Snowflake metrics within Grafana.

More ways to visualize Snowflake data

With version 1.9 of the Snowflake Enterprise data source, we’ve rolled out a pre-built dashboard called Snowpark Metrics. You can use this dashboard to monitor and analyze metrics for Snowpark, a set of libraries and runtimes that securely deploys and processes Python and other programming languages in Snowflake to build data pipelines, machine learning models, and more.

With the Snowpark Metrics dashboard, you can understand, at a glance, all active functions and procedures within your events table. You can also see and filter the functions being used on a specific database, as well as monitor function, memory, and CPU usage to help identify potential bottlenecks.

In addition, we’ve released a Logs dashboard where you can navigate the log messages from the events table. This is useful to debug an escalation alert or to do a deep dive into what’s going on within your system at any given time, using the time filters.

Security enhancements

We’ve also been working to provide a richer set of security features for our Snowflake data source plugin. 

You can now, for example, use key pair authentication to add another, more robust security layer beyond basic authentication. To generate public and private keys, we recommend following Snowflake documentation. Also, when using key pair authentication, be sure to update the rsa_public_key in Snowflake and provide the username and unencrypted private key in the data source configuration.

Additionally, you can use OAuth authentication to pass tokens to Snowflake on behalf of the user logged into Grafana. This feature works with our supported authentication providers. 

Lastly, the Snowflake Enterprise data source now supports Private data source connect (PDC), a solution that enables you to establish a private, secured connection between a Grafana Cloud instance, or stack, and data sources secured within a private network. To learn more about PDC, please reference our technical docs. 

Custom session parameters and default queries 

Snowflake has parameters that users can set at various levels. These parameters allow you to control the behavior of your account, user sessions, and objects, and they all have default values. Users of the Snowflake data source plugin now have the flexibility to override and customize their session parameters to, for example, increase the client memory limit. 

It’s also now possible to customize the default queries you use when creating a new visualization. This provides a solid starting point when querying data, especially if you tend to query from the same database.

FAQ: The Snowflake Enterprise data source for Grafana

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a cloud-based data storage and analytics service. Its AI Data Cloud helps organizations around the world build, use, and share their data, applications, and AI solutions. To learn more, check out the Snowflake website. 

What is an Enterprise data source for Grafana?

Grafana Enterprise data sources allow you to connect to external systems and popular proprietary platforms from within Grafana, so you can visualize data from a wide range of sources using your Grafana dashboards. While many Grafana data sources are built by our partners or community members, Enterprise data sources are built and maintained by Grafana Labs, and they are only available in Grafana Enterprise and across all Grafana Cloud tiers, including our generous Cloud free tier.

Snowflake is one of more than 30 Enterprise data sources currently in our catalog, alongside ServiceNow, Splunk, Datadog, Dynatrace, and AppDynamics. 

To learn more about Grafana Enterprise data sources, check out our recent guide. 

What are the key features of the Snowflake Enterprise data source for Grafana?

As covered above, key features of the Snowflake Enterprise data source for Grafana include:

• The ability to query and visualize Snowflake data alongside other data sources in Grafana
• A smart SQL query editor, supporting both time series and table formats for flexible data exploration
• Support for Grafana variables, including multi-value variables, for dynamic and reusable queries
• Support for annotations and alerting
• Enhanced security capabilities, such as support for multiple authentication options and Private data source connect (PDC)

Where can I learn more?

For more information and to get started with the Snowflake Enterprise data source today, you can check out our plugin catalog and our technical documentation.

The easiest way to get started with our Enterprise data source plugins is in Grafana Cloud. We have a generous forever-free tier that includes access to Enterprise data sources for 3 active users. If you haven’t already, sign up for free today!