Alerting

Using Slack for Snowflake Alerts

Slack spend digests

Staying on top of your Snowflake usage can be hard. To help you more easily keep an eye on your spend trends, we created Slack spend digests. Spend digests are a daily/weekly/monthly Slack message you can enable in settings. They are designed to help you easily keep tabs on your Snowflake spend, see if anything spiked, and understand what caused the spike if so.

Here’s a recent example of the daily spend digest for our Snowflake account:

SELECT Snowflake spend alerts in slack

Anytime something spikes, you can click straight into the relevant section of the SELECT web app (i.e. the warehouse page) and understand what drove the increase.

App installation

To enable the Slack spend digests, first install the SELECT Slack application. Navigate to Settings > Slack and then click the "Install now →" link. You'll be prompted with a screen like this:

SELECT Slack app installation

Our Slack app only requires access to list channels in your workspace and post messages. That's it!

Configure channel and digests

Once the app is installed, you can enter the name of the channel where the spend digests will be sent and configure which digests are sent.

SELECT Slack app installation

Once the channel is set, we recommend sending a test message to ensure the app permissions are working correctly.

Wait until first sync is complete!

Since test messages are populated with your account data, they cannot be sent until the first Snowflake metadata sync is complete.

Sending messages to a private channel

If you'd like your spend digests to be sent to a private Slack channel, add the Slack app to the channel first. You can do this by typing @SELECT in the channel and hitting enter. You'll then see a prompt to invite the app to the channel.